Pastor Stewart Rawson: Walking our spiritual journey with others is a gift

I am a Presbyterian minister. As a minister, one of my major responsibilities is to preach at our weekly worship service on Sunday morning. If you don't go to church or haven't been to a church in a while, the minister gets up at some point during the service and reads a passage from the Bible and then offers a lesson on that passage.

Depending on where you go to church, the preaching can last anywhere from seven to eight minutes to 20 or 30 minutes. When I was first ordained as a minister 30 years ago, it was not uncommon for ministers to preach for 45 minutes. Our attention spans have grown shorter over the years, and most ministers I know tend to keep their preaching under 20 minutes. When you are standing in front of the congregation, you can watch as people start staring off into the distance or even lift their arm up to look at their watch; this is usually their sign that it is time for you to wrap it up.

The goal of the sermon (what we call the minister's speech) is to educate the congregation on the importance of the Bible passage. The hope is that the people will hear the words of the preacher, and their lives may be changed, hopefully changed for the better. It is easy for us as human beings to become selfish and to think only of ourselves. When we gather with other people and when we worship together, it is an opportunity to think about God and how God might want us to treat other people. The goal of most ministers I know is to help guide their people to a deeper faithfulness.

In our church this summer, I have asked our members to submit questions, and these questions will become the basis for my preaching. My thought was that people have questions they want to ask God but don't often have the opportunity to ask these questions. So we distributed flyers to the congregation and asked them to write down their questions. A common theme of many of the questions we received asked God, "Why is there still suffering in the world?" A similar question, "If you are a loving God, then why are there still wars?" I came across a quote last week that said, "Sometimes I want to ask God why he allows poverty and injustice when he can do something about it … but I am afraid he might just ask me the same question" (source unknown).

One of the great challenges of being human is having questions that have no simple answers. We want to know why our loved one died long before we thought it was their time, we demand an answer, and the answer we are looking for doesn't come. I lost my mother a number of years ago, and a day does not go by I don't have a question I want to ask her. To me, one of the greatest gifts of being in a community like a church is you have a group of people to journey with as we ask these difficult questions. You have people who sit next to you that are wrestling with the same challenges. Sometimes you carry their burdens for them, and sometimes they carry your burdens for you, but the great reassurance is you are not alone. I believe in a loving God who forgives us and cares for us and is working to make all things new; being able to walk this journey with others seems to be one of the greatest gifts God gives to us.

Stewart Rawson is the pastor of First Presbyterian Church in downtown Sumter.