Dr. William A. Ritter
First United Methodist Church
Birmingham, Michigan
Scripture: II Corinthians 2:12, Revelation 3:8, 20-22
July 25, 2004
Your First Church trustees….ever relentless in their efforts to look out for you and this building in which you gather….have turned their attention to doors. More to the point, they have returned their attention to doors, given that I remember holding….then tabling….this same discussion five years ago. For the doors in this building are old and worn. They neither look good nor work good. Few of them can hold a finish on….or keep intruders out.
But new ones are expensive. Very expensive. And so we are going the repair and refurbish route one more time….one door at a time….until the projects presently before us are behind us. Then there will be time for “the day of the doors.”
But I found it interesting that in a meeting of the House and Property Committee (which is not the committee to which I would turn, were I looking for nostalgia and sentimentality), someone argued for preserving the old doors as a way of remembering and venerating all of the people who had previously passed through them. It made me think that there ought to be a plaque by one of them…..a plaque that begins: “Through these doors have passed….” Well, you finish the sentence. If one strikes my imagination, I’ll push it through to completion.
Which led me to a study of doors in the Bible….some of them literal, others symbolic. I learned about doors in temples and doors in tents. The doors in tents are presently called flaps, but the Bible seems to lack a word for “flap.” I learned about doors closed for privacy so that no one would know what was going on inside (“And when we get behind closed doors….”). And I learned about doors closed for security, so that no one could get at those living (or, in some cases, hiding) inside. I reread stories about doors pounded on by unprepared neighbors seeking bread at midnight or by unwise virgins seeking the bridegroom at midnight.
I also read about doors as places where sin crouches (Genesis 4:7) and doors through which hope enters (Hosea 2:14). I read about doors open to the church (John 10:1), doors open to the Gentiles (Acts 14:27), and doors representing opportunities for ministry (II Corinthians 12): “When we came to Troas, a door of opportunity stood open to us.” And I found familiar words about Jesus who knocks on doors….enters doors….even is the door.
Professionally, I once followed a colleague who claimed that the secret to ministry was to go out three or four nights a week knocking on doors. Which he did at suppertime when most of the occupants would be at home and very few would want him to stay very long. I suppose it got him free food back in the days when families had much smaller kitchens, but actually cooked in them. I never asked him how many doors were closed to him or slammed behind him. Which can happen in a world where the phrase “Show him the door” is more dismissive than invitational.
All of this “door business” began when Rachel Billups (our Duke intern) asked in one of our mentoring sessions: “So how did you get here?” I wasn’t sure what she meant by “here.” Did she mean ministry in general? Or did she mean Birmingham in particular? She was talking about both. Sort of. But, more to the point, she was talking about how one finds one’s way….or how one finds God’s way….from the place where one begins to the place where one ends. You see, Rachel and I share something in common. We both come from somewhat narrow slices of experience and expectation. She from the country. Me from the city. And while, in neither of our cases, was there all that much holding us back, neither was there all that much pushing us on.
“So how did you get here?” she wanted to know. Meaning all of it. She wanted to know about the strange range of churches I have served, places I have lived, people I have met and experiences I have had, given that there was little in my background that suggested (even hinted) that half of this was possible. When my mother married my father, she moved six miles from her childhood to make her bed with him. And when my father married my mother, he moved four blocks from his childhood to make his bed with her. Which, thirty years later, was the house in which he died. His death occurred following the Detroit riot, one week before he and my mother were scheduled to move. Concerning that move, I think that because his heart wasn’t in it, it was no longer up to it.
My people were not traveling people. Neither were my people college people. My father, who may have been the smartest man I ever knew, decided to abort the last half of his senior year in high school by hopping a freight train with Louie Malchie. And although he probably explained it as “seeing the world,” I think that what he was doing was running from the world. Which may explain why, years later, he chose to stay home rather than attend my graduation from Yale. It had less to do with what I’d just finished than with what he’d never started. I often tell people that when I went to Albion to begin my collegiate journey, I first laid eyes upon it the day I moved into it. I applied because my minister said I should. I never asked why. He never said why. And even though we lived a mere ninety miles from the place I was to spend the next four years of my life, no one in my family ever suggested that we get in the car and check it out. Nor did I think to get in the car and check it out. Although we had a car….and enough money to gas it. Do you see what I mean about coming from a narrow slice of experience and expectation?
“So how did you get here?” Rachel wanted to know. I told her I thought God had something to do with it. Heck, I think God had a lot to do with it. You have long since known that I am neither a Calvinist nor a Predestinationist. I do not believe God micro-manages the universe or my life. Not that I believe God is indifferent to the universe and my life. For, in recent years, you have heard me testify to “a growing sense of divine steerage at the heart of things.” But you have also heard me suggest that there’s a lot of play in the steering wheel….a lot of play in God’s steering wheel. Meaning that any combination of cussed resistance and stupid ignorance on my part has sometimes been enough to keep me from doing what God would have me do, or going where God would have me go.
Yet I have sensed God’s steerage and, in the main, yielded to it. When in doubt, I have gone (as they say) with the flow….trusting that “the flow” was what the Bible calls “the river of life.” My life. Meandering, yet strangely purposeful.
I envy those people who seem to know with absolute certainty what the voice of God is telling them to do and where the voice of God is telling them to go. Alas, I have never been one of them. I’m deaf. Or dense. All I know is that my discernment is usually retrospective. Meaning that “I get it” after “I’ve done it.” Seldom before. There is a rhythm to God’s will and my obedience. It starts with steering. Which is followed by going. And finally by understanding. Which is what I mean when I say “I get it after I’ve done it.” All I know is that, at the present moment, my life feels strangely right. Which I interpret to mean “as it has been meant to be.” Although my theology has sufficient flexibility so as to believe it could have turned out differently, and I might have felt similarly. Mine has been a well-traveled road. But this is not the only road I might have taken.
So what does any of this have to do with doors? Well, whenever I meet people who are as dense about the will of God as I am, but who look for it as passionately as I do, I detect a common thread in the conversation. It goes something like this:
You know, Bill, my life has seemed full of doors that closed on me even as others opened to me. And I finally got it through my thick head to stop banging on the closed ones, the better that I might enter the open ones.
But that can involve a lot of trial and error….painful trial and error….unless you have help. What kind of help? I am talking about someone to beckon….direct….maybe even shove. Which leads me to this momentary interlude from Desiree Cooper in last week’s Free Press. Desiree’s opinions occasionally provoke me. But her candor delights me. And her passion for family deeply moves me. As in this:
This summer I didn’t hesitate to send our 13-year-old daughter, Rae, to camp in Boston for three weeks. Besides the fact that the camp would widen her horizons, I thought it was time for her to try her wings in a flock of strangers.
My daughter’s eyes welled when I presented the camp to her as an “opportunity” (which sounded to her ears more like “a constructive, pressure-packed boot camp”). She reluctantly signed up for mini-courses in digital photography, marine biology and tennis, all the while trying to rally support from her aunts, uncles and grandparents to thwart the plan.
I ignored her third-party pleas. I suspected that she was more afraid of self-discovery than she was of the camp. But if she didn’t have a good idea who she was before going to high school next year, I thought there would be plenty of peer groups to decide for her. And so I planted my feet. “That’s it,” I said. “You’re going.”
“So how did you get here?” Rachel wanted to know. I got here with the help of a lot of people who suggested that I, too, may have been more afraid of self-discovery than of ministry. Let me tell you about four who showed me the door. Not the only four. But an early four….when it could have gone a very different way, don’t you see.
The first was Albert Keenan. Mr. Keenan taught literature at Mackenzie High School. And when I took his class in the eleventh grade, I marveled that the Detroit Board of Education would allow someone who was at least ninety years old to teach high school students. But they did. Which was amazing.
Ours was a class in English literature. Which was boring. Perhaps because the class occurred at a boring hour….after lunch, as I remember. And there were days when I wasn’t sure if Mr. Keenan wasn’t almost as bored as we were. Which may have been the reason he decided we should read MacBeth….as a class….for several days….out loud. With each of us taking parts as they appeared….and as he assigned.
Well, the time went by and the pages went by. And it seemed as if everybody in the class had been called upon to read a part but me. And it wasn’t so much that I wanted a part as that I didn’t want to be overlooked for a part (which would have felt like being sent to right field after all the better readers had been chosen).
So at the end of a session I approached him, saying timidly to him: “Mr. Keenan, I have yet to be called upon. So if you need anyone else to read, I’m still available.” To which he said: “Be patient, Mr. Ritter. We have better things in mind for you.” Which turned out to be the meatiest, juiciest role in the play. To this day, I don’t remember what he saw in me that led him to give it to me. Nor do I remember anything else about the class or his role in it. Just that he said: “Be patient, Mr. Ritter. We have better things in mind for you.”
It wasn’t long after that I was called down to the principal’s office, inhabited by one Joseph Pinnock. Who, let the record show, was the only person ever born with white hair, wearing a three piece suit. And wouldn’t you know that the same Board of Education that allowed a ninety- year-old man to teach English literature, also allowed a man ten years his senior to be a principal.
Telling me to sit down opposite him at his desk, he opened a huge book that contained student records….one page per student. In front of me….staring at me….was my record. Every class. Every grade. Decent. But far from stellar. He muttered something about how it could be better….probably should be better. But he allowed as to how that was entirely up to me.
Then he flipped several pages back to the record of Rita Ponte. Which was stellar. I mean, it couldn’t have been better. “Take a look at that, Mr. Ritter,” he said. And for just a moment….on that morning….in that office….there wasn’t anybody in the eleventh grade I hated more than Rita Ponte. After which he said: “Mr. Ritter, sometime during the next year both you and Miss Ponte will be applying to college. With her record, I will be able to do something for her. With your record, there will be far less that I can do for you. But people at this school who know you better than I do tell me there is no reason her record can’t be your record.” And from that day forward, it was.
Now advance with me to my senior year at Albion College. I am a pre-ministerial student with a major in philosophy. A new teacher joins the faculty. His name is William Gillham and he is fresh from Princeton. Bored with the sameness of previous instruction, I take three of his classes in one year. We hit it off. I like him. He likes me. He wants to know where I am going to seminary. I name a pair of schools that are close….denominationally and geographically. He tells me “No.” He tells me I am going inter-denominationally and easterly. He tells me I am going to Yale or Harvard (or Union in New York City).
I tell him he is nuts. Never have I heard anything so preposterous or impossible. I am certain they will not want me there. Neither can I afford to go there. I even have doubts as to whether I would know what road to take to get there. So I apply and gain acceptance from a pair of seminaries…. our seminaries….in Ohio and Illinois. Where I would have gotten a very fine education.
But he refuses to let up. “Just apply out East,” he says. “What can it hurt to apply?” So I do. Just to shut him up. I picture the admissions committees at Yale and Harvard laughing uproariously as they read my application, ridicule my pretension and stamp my rejection. But the last laugh was his laugh….when they did for me what he knew they would do for me, and gave to me what he hoped they would give to me. And my take-away from Yale had less to do with better classes taught by better teachers, so much as my astonishing discovery that if I could cut it there, I could probably cut it anywhere….and maybe I had better open my eyes a little wider to what God might ask of me (or do with me).
Which brings me full circle to Herb Hausser, my first-ever District Superintendent. With five months to go before graduating from seminary, he asked me if I had an image of my first pastoral appointment. I told him that I wanted to try it on my own….out-state….some little church….maybe two little churches. He allowed as to how I could do that and inferred that he could make it happen. But he said he had no intention of making it happen. What he said was: “It’ll be too easy there. You’ll get lazy there....sloppy there….settle into bad habits there.” Then he added (and I can quote this paragraph as if he said it yesterday):
God has given you a great talent. And God has, for the moment, placed in my hands the responsibility for developing that talent. So I am sending you to be the low man on the totem pole of a great church, where there will be people who will stretch you….challenge you….teach you….and (I suspect) appreciate you. I see you as being able to serve any church we have in this Conference. So I’ve got to do my part to get you ready.
Those four showed me the door. But, in every case, it was not a door standing beyond me, so much as a door that I had prematurely closed inside me. A door which had to be opened internally before I could walk through others externally. I believe God used those men. Or perhaps it is better to say that God used those moments. To reach me. To teach me. And to help me see things I could not otherwise see. Because shutting the door is only the second from the last thing most of us do. So what, you ask, is the last thing we do (after shutting the door)? You know as well as I do what the last thing is that we do after shutting the door. We turn off the lights. That’s the last thing most of us do after shutting the door.
* * * * *
And that, my dear, multiply-talented, amazingly-gifted Rachel, is as close as I can come to telling you how I got here.
