LEAWOOD - Fourteen pastors’ ministries were celebrated at the 2010 Retirement Service at the Kansas East Annual Conference. Revs. Howard and Lois Johnson gave the dialog sermon.
The Johnsons sermon focused on developing deep and trusting relationships. The first story they shared was about an accident they had seen on I-70. They didn’t look particularly closely at who was involved because they assumed they didn’t know anyone who was in it. They found out later that they did.
“We really didn’t see them because we thought they were strangers,” Howard Johnson said.
Lois Johnson said this reminded her of the movie “Avatar.” In the movie, the people on Pandora talked about seeing each other, not just with their eyes but heart to heart, a deeper kind of knowledge.
“I wonder if we as the Body of Christ see people,” she said. “Do we really understand them?”
The Gospel reading from Matthew focused on the story of Jesus telling his followers that whenever they cared for the hungry, sick and imprisoned, they cared for Jesus.
She recalled a story about a young boy who watched a sculptor work for a day, left and came back when the sculpture was finished. The boy was amazed that the sculptor had been able to see the lion of the finished statue in the large block of stone with which he started.
“Do we have that vision to see the lion in the stone?” Lois Johnson asked. “God saw in a man named Saul, a man named Paul. He wasn’t any innocent stone to be seen through. There was a lot of junk in the way.”
Howard Johnson said we encounter people like Saul every day, who have a lot of junk for us to see through before we can get to really know them.
He shared a story conference member Roger Dressler shared with him about a woman that he was working with in southeast Kansas. The woman was suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder following the disasters that happened in that part of the state. Her only means of supporting herself was to raise dogs inside her small home because of the ground contamination in her yard.
Initially, Dressler focused on the smell and mess and everything in her home, but as he got to know her, those things mattered less. He discovered she was the same age as his oldest daughter and everything changed in the way he viewed her.
“No longer did he see her as a person who lived in this messy house,” Howard Johnson said. “What is it that turns us? What is it that helps us to see?”
On this spring’s Youth trip to New York City, Howard had an experience that really made an impression on him, and one that the trip evaluations proved made an impression on many of the students as well.
An advocacy group that had been working with workers at a restaurant called Cafe con Leche who were expected to work 17-hour days without proper compensation. Legal proceedings had been started, and the former employees were picketing the shop.
“We held picket signs and picketed in front of this place with the advocacy group and former employees,” Howard Johnson said. “We become changed when we stand with people.”
A neighborhood woman walked by while they were protesting, and as Howard explained to her what they were doing.
“Her face melted me,” Howard Johnson recalled. The woman, who lived nearby, had been unaware of the situation. She said to him, “You mean you came all this way to tell us what was going on?”
Moved, she signed the petition and protested with the youth.
“Often, we don’t want to look. We don’t want to listen. We get in the way a lot,” he said. “The question is, are we really truly ready to see?”
The 14 people whose ministries were celebrated were Judy Atwood, diaconal minister; Jerry L. Bever, a local pastor; Rev. Jim Darby; Rev. Robert Ford; Rev. Donovan Gaffney; Rev. Jack Gregory; Rev. Marilyn Gregory; Rev. Hugh Maddry; Rev. Vicki Reagan; Rev. Ronald Schultz; Rev. Noel Stephens; Rev. Jerry Vaughn; Rev. Sandra Vogel; and Rev. Kevin Williams.
