Webster Word

A Pastor's Message

In 1926 Langston Hughes wrote a poem, “Mother to Son,” where a mother is explaining to her son that life for her “ain’t been no crystal stair.” She tells her son that her hard life “had tacks in it, and splinters, and boards torn up, and places with no carpet on the floor – bare.” Then the mother instructs the son, “So, boy, don’t you turn back. Don’t you set down on the steps ‘cause you find it’s kinder hard.”

Life in the church is that way sometimes – tacks and splinters, boards (people) who are torn up and hurting, places where our lives feel bare and exposed and painful. Sometimes it is difficult – too little money, not enough volunteers, too many meetings, everyone is so busy – and the list goes on.

Then we remember: “…we are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God” (Ephesians 2: 19). Even the early church congregations had to be reminded that despite money problems, unrest among members, unfaithfulness to God, following the ways of the world and forsaking God’s call – never-the-less, we are a people called apart to be God’s own household. Called apart to be faithful!

That is a difficult calling. Life still has its tacks and splinters, times our lives are torn in two and places where pain overwhelms us. Those are the times we need to listen carefully and be reassured that God is with us.

Week after week the church gathers to nurture and nourish each other in this household of faith. When the Son of God walked among us in the flesh, he spoke to ordinary persons and said, “Follow me.” This Jesus was not preaching about a God who reconciles the world in the abstract. Rather we are reconciled to this God in the context of the world as it really is - a world in which all manner of evil and injustice were, and still can be, found.

Members of the household of God, we are called to be faithful. As Hughes’ mother says to her son: “But all the time, I’ve been climbin’ on, and reachin’ landin’s. Don’t you fall now – For I’m still goin’, honey. I’se still climbin’, and life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.”