(read at my father's twenty-years as pastor celebration)

If I choose not to become attached to nouns – a person, place, or thing – then…my heart cannot be broken because I never risked giving it away.
– Terry Tempest Williams

Over the span of their lives in ministry, my parents have intentionally chosen to become attached to nouns – people, places, and things. And for the past twenty years, they’ve become attached to you – a town called Nashville with a Main Street and the Scrappers and the Tastee Freeze and Fourth of July celebrations and Christmas musicals complete with camels and donkeys and Vacation Bible School one more time and Night’s Out for Ladies and a drama group who took the show on the road and a church campus that has extended its boundaries over the years. They’ve become attached to some dreams, some of which have come true - owning their own home complete with a bluebird feeder in the backyard and the occasional gift of a visitation of ducks during the breakfast hour. Some dreams came but faded - mornings and evenings of donning boots and a hat and feeding a horse and handling tack and being humbled by the achingly beautiful smell of a barn and the realization that God does indeed know the desires of our hearts. They’ve sat with you as pacemakers were installed in your parents because mom or dad was moving too slow and they’ve prayed with you over sons and daughters because the kids were moving way too fast. They’ve guided you in getting some of those sons and daughters successfully down the aisle into holy matrimony and they’ve stood beside you when what God hath joined together, man or woman or something, put asunder. They’ve held your hands as you’ve put parents, friends, and children in the ground and said though tears, “dust to dust” and they’ve hugged your necks as the very next Sunday saw the dedication of a newborn baby and you said through tears, “It is not a slight thing when those so fresh from God love us.” They rejoiced with you when prodigals came home and they wept with you, and sometimes wept at a distance, when the prodigal never came to his or her senses and still remains in the far country.

They have chosen to risk giving their hearts away and they have known great joy. But they have also known great heartbreak. They have seen with their eyes and touched with their hands the pain that comes with being attached to nouns. And by the mercies of God, they keep choosing to stay attached.

The temptation over the years in ministry – well, how about…in life - is to stop becoming attached, to shut your heart down, to close the windows to your soul and say, “No more nouns! It hurts too much!” But the example my parents have lived out is that of risky business - staying openhearted. Now be careful and don’t romanticize it or superspiritualize it; it’s not easy (some call it the battle) and it will test your faith in both God and man. To live with an open heart will present many days when you’ll be convinced that nobody cares and, in the words of Annie Dillard, that even “God doesn’t give a hoot.” But it is the way of the Christ-life; it is the path that is walked with the rhythm of three steps - faith, hope and love – and the greatest of these is LOVE. For you see, there was a moment in the mind of the divine when God said, “I will become attached to nouns – I’ll become flesh and blood and bone and sinew and hair and spit; I’ll attach myself to the dusty streets of a place known as Palestine and not stray far from her borders; I’ll even attach myself to a group of people probably best described as gypsies, tramps and thieves. I will give away my heart and know great joy, but in the giving I know that it will also be broken and betrayed and forsaken…and I will one day allow myself to become attached to another noun, a tree, and I will willingly let them bleed me of the blood that will cover the sins of the world. For God so loved this world, that He became attached to nouns…That’s really what my parents have done these twenty years – they’ve loved you. And you have loved them back.

The gospels record the Lord saying, “If you want to show me how much you love me, then love other people.” I’m gonna’ roll the dice this morning and bet that the same applies to honor – “If you want to show me honor, then show it to other people.” And so we honor God today by honoring two people for what the world would diagnose as attachment disorder; however, we know that giving away your heart is really the way of the cross. And the way of the cross gets us all where we really want to be - “it is sweet to know, as I onward go, the way of the cross leads…HOME.”