“The Weight of Many Hands”

May 18

“Moses spoke to the Lord, saying, ‘Let the Lord, the God of the spirits of all flesh, appoint someone over the congregation who shall go out before them and come in before them, who shall lead them out and bring them in, so that the congregation of the Lord may not be like sheep without a shepherd.”
So the Lord said to Moses, “Take Joshua son of Nun, a man in whom is the spirit, and lay your hand upon him … So Moses did as the Lord commanded him. He took Joshua and had him stand before Eleazar the priest and the whole congregation; he laid his hands on him and commissioned him, as the Lord had directed.”

Next Monday, May 12, is the fortieth anniversary of my ordination. It took place at Carthage Christian Church in Carthage, TN, a congregation of two dozen who endured my awkward first efforts at preaching, teaching, and pastoring from August 1982 (age 22 years 11 months) to June 1985 when Jennie and I moved to St. Louis to begin our first full-time pastorate at Compton Heights Christian Church.

I remember the people there that day whose influence on my life is still very much present.

My ordination sermon was preached by Dr. Herman Norton, professor of American Church History and Dean of the Disciples Divinity House at Vanderbilt. Until he died in 1992, Dr. Norton was a one-man encourager of Disciples of Christ students. He raised money for scholarships, taught Disciples history classes, recruited new students, and provided references for Disciples students seeking their first churches after graduation – a steadfast advocate, friend, and pastor to decades of aspiring ministers.

Dr. Norton preached on the story of Noah's ark. In his Tidewater Virginia accent, he began the sermon with the words, "Noah (pronounced Knower) was a righteous man." He then explicated aspects of Knower's righteousness and called me to aspire to the same. I learned from others at whose ordinations Herman preached that they, too, were ordained to the tune of the Knower sermon which closed with him inviting the ordinand to come forward to kneel on the chancel steps and receive the laying on of hands.

Among those who joined Dr. Norton in laying hands on me were:

Mr. Bill (given name: Alexander Campbell Read, Jr.), head elder.
Johnny Wray, Chair of the Commission on the Ministry of the Tennessee Region.
June Moll, a pioneering woman in ministry who took me under her wing during an internship I did at Central Christian in Danville, IL, in the summer of 1981.
Dick Taylor, Jennie’s father, a Presbyterian minister (and a darn good one, at that!)
Bill Friskics and Kaki Warren, now husband and wife, Paul Shupe, and Mark Overlock, Vandy classmates.
John Talbott, pastor of the Disciples church in Cookeville, TN, who presided with Jennie’s dad and the pastor of the Presbyterian church in Amelia, VA, where we were married the previous summer.
Bronson Netterville, Regional Minister of Tennessee.

In the congregation to witness my sending forth into ministry were Jennie’s mother, Virginia, my Uncle Paul and Aunt Bebe, who represented my family (My dad was undergoing cancer treatment in Massachusetts with my mother keeping vigil alongside), Paul and Mark’s spouses, MaryAnn and Wendy, Sharon Clayton, the chair of the board from Compton Heights, Roy Carter and his wife Robbie Key Carter of the Braden Chapel United Methodist Church, a historic African-American congregation in Carthage, and a handful of other Vandy friends and Carthage locals.

All the forenamed are gone now except for Johnny and my Vandy friends. The church is gone, too. It closed a few years after I left and burned to the ground in the early 90s.

Years ago, Dr. Fred Craddock preached a sermon on ordination. All I remember is the title: “The Weight of Many Hands.” I’ve looked for it over the years, but even sleuthing with Google and AI, I can find no trace of it. I do, however, know its meaning deep down. I have spent four decades empowered and directed by the ever-present weight of those hands. Mind you, theirs is not an onerous weight, a burden. To the contrary, their presence is an unfailing source of “strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow,” an indefatigable blessing. There is a spiritual alchemy that transforms a mass of hands pressing downward into an irrepressible force lifting upward and impelling forward, a dynamic that cannot be explained, only experienced.

Fast forward nearly forty years. At the close of worship on my last Sunday at Central Christian, Lexington, in August 2022 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhpYNjRoOaU) my colleague, the Rev. Elizabeth King, invited me to come forward. She asked me to kneel on the chancel steps and then invited Jennie, our daughters and their spouses, my brother Mike and his partner Beth, members of the search committee who called me, Regional Minister Rev. Dr. Don Gillett, and other gathered friends including cherished Bethany Fellows colleagues Don Schutt, Kim Gage Ryan, Gary Straub, and Bob Hill, to come forward and lay hands on me.

Elizabeth said,

"David, forty years and three weeks ago, you entered into congregational ministry. On May 12, 1985, you were ordained with the laying on of hands and with prayer for the Holy Spirit's inspiration. Trusting that the Spirit has continued to work in you throughout your life and ministry and the Spirit will continue to work in you and in us still, we lay hands on you and pray for you again now."
Don Schutt then prayed.

In these first three years of retirement, I have returned to that moment numerous times. I have wondered, For what ministry were hands laid on me on Central’s steps?

When my mentor and friend, the Rev. Dr. Albert Pennybacker, died in his 92nd year, I remembered his words about the inviolable call to ministry. "You can't get out of ministry," he said, "It's like getting unbaptized. It doesn't work." In a similar vein, Fred Craddock said, “We never retire from following Jesus.” We're called to be lifelong "stewards of God's mysteries" (1 Corinthians 4:1 NRSV), ever discerning new ways to partner with the risen Christ in what the rabbis call tikkun olam – the repair of the world. So it was that I wrote in my prayer journal a year before that final service, “I just want to follow Jesus the rest of my life, trying to do every day what I sense he beckons me to.”

When I was in discernment about retiring, I voiced my emerging anxiety to Amanda, my spiritual director of 10+ years: What will I do?

I wrote her sage advice in my journal: "First, let the field lie fallow."

So began what Jennie called our gap year, a Jubilee Year of Sabbath pause. At a contemplative retreat we attended in month two of retirement in a remote, forested stretch of Lake Superior, we were welcomed with the story of native guides leading explorers toward a destination. After days of rigorous travel, the explorers were up at dawn, ready to press on, but the guides demurred, explaining, "We will go no further today. We're waiting for our souls to catch up to us."

When someone asked me back then, "What are you going to do?" I answered, "For now, I'm letting the field lie fallow."

The spring of 2023, after letting the field lie fallow for the fall and winter, I got a call from a friend, Gary Straub, calling on behalf of a friend, Kim Gage Ryan, asking me to consider moving to Columbia, MO, to do an interim ministry at Broadway Christian Church.

After completing eleven months of ministry there and returning home to Lexington last summer, Central Rocky Mountain Regional Minister Dale Matherly asked me to consider a call to an interim ministry in Fort Collins, CO.

Last Sunday, Heart of the Rockies Christian Church voted to call the Rev. Cody Roberston to be their next permanent Senior Pastor. Jennie and my last Sunday will be June 8.

The folks here are asking, “What’s next for you two?”

We don’t know. We have no clue what will sprout in the field left fallow for another season, but we trust it will be revealed to us in God’s time through God’s ever-creative ways of getting our attention and consent.

Of this we are confident.

It is attested to by the weight of many hands.