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READING: I Samuel 28:7-8, 11-15

Then [King] Saul said to his servants, "Seek out for me ... a medium, that I may go to her and inquire of her." And his servants said to him, " ... [T]here is a medium at Endor." So Saul disguised himself and put on other garments, and went, he and two men with him; and they came to the woman by night. And he said, "Divine for me a spirit, and bring up for me whomever I shall name to you." ... [T]he woman said, "Whom shall I bring up for you?" He said, "Bring up Samuel for me." When the woman saw Samuel, she cried out with a loud voice; ... The king said to her, " ... [W]hat do you see?" And the woman said to Saul, "I see a [spirit] coming up out of the earth." He said to her, "What is his appearance?" And she said, "An old man is coming up; and he is wrapped in a robe." And Saul knew that it was Samuel, and he bowed with his face to the ground, and did obeisance. Then Samuel said to Saul, "Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?" Saul answered, "I am in great distress; ... therefore I have summoned you to tell me what I shall do."

READING: Hebrews 11: 1-4a, 7a, 8, 32-34a; 12: 1

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the [people] of old received divine approval. By faith we understand that ...what is seen was made out of things which do not appear. By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice [and] received approval as righteous ... By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, took heed and constructed an ark for the saving of his household ... By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place ... and he went out, not knowing where he was to go. ... And what more shall I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets – who through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, received promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched raging fire, escaped the edge of the sword, [and] won strength out of weakness ... Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, ... and let us run with perseverence the race that is set before us..."

[The offertory anthem was Lennon/McCartney, "In My Life."]

SERMON: "Ghosts"

Last summer I lived in an enchanted forest – an enchanted forest in Columbus, Ohio. I was house-sitting in a little castle – a Spanish Mission style home complete with Mexican tiles, Navajo rugs and pieces of pottery from the southwest tribes. I brought pictures of it; they're here in the back of the Main Hall – have a look at them before you go. A Spanish Mission style home nestled among the trees: here was the signature architecture of the desert, bedecked with the artifacts of its native region, plopped down in the mists and lushness of the eastern woodlands. Towering trees – pines, beeches, and various hardwoods – shaded and sheltered the glade and cooled the breezes that rustled through and beneath their branches. Mists rose each morning from the nearby Olentangy River, and each morning I was greeted by the glow of sunbeams streaming through the leaves and mist. I was lucky enough to capture that sight on film; the picture is here in front, and I invite you to come up after the service and see it for yourself.

I was in Columbus to do a summer hospital chaplaincy as part of my training for the ministry, a program called Clinical Pastoral Education, or CPE. Five days a week and sometimes on weekends, I would drive twenty minutes to the hospital, Mount Carmel Medical Center, near downtown Columbus. In the evening I would return to that enchanted forest where the little castle waited in the cool of the day. I would take off my suit and tie, put on jeans and a T-shirt and my biking helmet and ride a few miles on the bike trails beside the gentle Olentangy, with their wooden bridges, parks, ball fields, children playing soccer and other games, bikers and joggers and rollerbladers and people just out for a walk. Sometimes I would walk rather than bike, finding closer communion with nature – insects, wildflowers, the smell of the water, the particular toadstools of my childhood memories of Ohio. When I was growing up, in my elementary school years, I and my family lived near Cleveland, Ohio, and I have memories of the weeds and wildflowers and bugs and toadstools of Ohio, the kinds of memories that elementary school children collect in their first, intent discoveries of the natural world. There on the trails, or in the glade around the little castle in the enchanted forest where I would do yardwork, I met familiar shapes and smells and textures, old sprouting and crawling friends – like ghosts – familiar companions of long, long ago.

Like a scene from Brigadoon, the little castle shimmered in the mist each morning as I left for the day, left to serve my summer chaplaincy at Mount Carmel Medical Center. Five days a week and sometimes on weekends I would drive those twenty minutes to a very different landscape. Out of the enchanted forest, past where the Olentangy flows into the wider Scioto River, following the Scioto to where it runs between downtown Columbus and the original settlement of Franklinton. There, towering over the homes and businesses of Franklinton – not an affluent section of town – stands Mount Carmel. Its emergency room serves many who cannot afford regular health care, many for whom regular checkups are a luxury. People who struggle to feed and clothe themselves. People who live in trailers. During the summer I met patients from all walks of life. People of various cultures – African American, Native American, Appalachian. People of various faiths – Pentecostal or Apostolic, Catholic, Jewish, mainline Protestant, Buddhist, unchurched. All needing medical care, some needing more than that, most with a story they wanted to tell.

Mount Carmel was for me a place that exacted wakefulness, a place where reality was to be experienced in its fullness, where stories were told with intention and were to be listened to with attention. Adequately oriented to the terrain but little knowing how to move through it, I and five other students were sent out to serve as ministers to the sick, to those in pain, to the dying, to the broken and suffering and to the loved ones – broken and suffering themselves – who stood with them or held vigil. We were to be the listeners, the comforters, the non-anxious presence, the vehicles of the presence of God. We who knew little about them, and little more about ourselves. We who little knew how little we knew.

I learned to pray at Mount Carmel. Prayer was important to people there. It was one of the few efficacious things a chaplain had to offer. And so I had to learn to pray. I was assigned to the oncology unit – cancer patients and their families – families holding vigil, patients facing or fearing death, some meeting it and others escaping for the time being. I was often called upon to pray with them. I, who never pray, at least not formally or verbally, with words, addressing a deity. How could I do that authentically?

I was haunted by childhood memories of prayer. Prayers that the minister said in church that were very long. Prayers that the congregation read from the order of service that were very long. Prayers said at the holiday dinner table – never the everyday dinner table – which were usually very short. Those of you who have met my father know that he is a man of few words. His standard grace is, "Lord, bless this food to the nourishment of our bodies and us to thy service. Amen." Short and to the point. And I was never in the habit of saying the "now I lay me down to sleep" variety of prayer, nor the "God gimme" variety. How could I pray with these suffering, distressed people? What could I say?

Part of the CPE experience is supervision, both individual supervision by a certified CPE supervisor, and what is called peer supervision. The six of us student chaplains met all together with our supervisor to share our experiences, critique each other, and pool our wisdom or at least our guesses. One tool we used to do this was the writing of verbatims. Each of us would write one verbatim a week – an account, as accurate and exact as we could make it, of a visit we made to a patient, that we wanted to reflect on with the group's help. I brought several prayer verbatims to the group during the first part of the summer. "What did you think of my prayer?" I would ask. They would tell me what they thought about the prayer, and what they thought about other aspects of the visit, too, some of which I didn't ask about. Prayers were one among many kinds of things I and my fellow students brought to these sessions. We engaged in self-critique, mutual critique, discovering or pointing out blind spots or missed opportunities, discovering or pointing out our "hot buttons," discovering or pointing out how dumb some of the things we said must or might have sounded, discovering or pointing out the assumptions we made or the facts we didn't ask about. These sessions were often intense, the feedback sometimes painful, usually illuminating, always well-intended. They were always in the morning. Twice a week we started our day with one. And having discovered our immense capacity for blunders, we walked right out to blunder again through another day of chaplaincy.

One night, in the midst of this summer of intense learning and self-discovery, one night in July, as I lay asleep in the little castle in the enchanted forest, I had a dream. In my dream, I was exactly where I actually was – lying down in that same room, asleep. And in my dream, I woke up because I sensed there was someone else in the room. I looked; it was my mother. She came near me, comforted me and told me that she loved me. And then I actually woke up. It was like I blinked and she disappeared. I realized later that the morning I had this dream was the second anniversary of my mother's death.

Mom has haunted my seminary education from the start. She died a little more than a month before I entered seminary. An intensity of academic study I had never known before was accompanied by an intensity of sorrow I had never known before. That first semester, I had two Bible classes: "Introduction to Old Testament" and "Introduction to New Testament." My mother was a Bible student and a Bible teacher in her churches all her life. She haunted my studies of the Bible. Through them I was in touch with her, and found comfort in my grieving. I never wrote in a Bible before that semester, but Mom used to write all over her Bibles – yes, "Bibles," plural – and starting that semester I wrote in my Bible. It was not just any Bible. It was the Bible I received in Sunday School from the Presbyterian church we attended in Cleveland. All those years and I hadn't written in that Bible. It was about time.

There's something I didn't tell you about my experiences with prayer. I remember, back in that Presbyterian church in Cleveland where I received that Bible, back when I was in elementary school and discovering the small wonders of the world, sometimes back then when the minister said one of his long prayers from the pulpit, I felt something. I sensed a presence. Not a ghost, exactly. More of a spirit, a living presence. The presence of God, I thought. And sometimes last summer, as I held hands with a patient or family member, and bowed my head with them, and closed my eyes, and prayed: "Dear God, we ask your presence with us in this difficult time. We ask your guidance and your strength through the transitions and adjustments ahead, and strength to go where we are needed and to do what you would still have us do. In your name we pray, Amen." Sometimes when I prayed that prayer – a prayer I prayed many times, a prayer I felt I could say and mean something by it – sometimes when I prayed that prayer with them, I felt something. I sensed a presence. Not a ghost, exactly. More of a spirit, a living presence. Only this time, I had invoked it. Or perhaps I just noticed it, like I noticed the weeds and the wildflowers, the bugs and the toadstools – perhaps I just remembered how to notice something I used to notice and was familiar with as a child.

One of the patients on my unit was a young man named Kris. Kris was twenty-one years old, about to be a senior at The Ohio State University. He had gone to see his doctor because of some bleeding that he thought was probably hemorrhoids. His doctor sent him to the hospital for blood tests. His diagnosis was leukemia. The doctors say that leukemia is a thirty-day disease: either they get it under control in that time, or they don't. They immediately prepared Kris for chemotherapy.

I was there a short time after his family had learned of this diagnosis. I spent some time then talking with his mother, listened to her feelings – shock, wanting to know more about this disease – and showed her the pamphlet room, where she could find information about leukemia and all its forms and treatments, so that she could better absorb what the doctors were telling Kris and her.

Over the next two weeks, I had several conversations with Kris. He was a bright young man with many interests. We talked about the ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian kingdoms and their influence on ancient Israel and the Biblical narratives. He told me about medieval armor and how it evolved in response to new weapons such as the English longbow. We talked about Doctor Who. Kris told his mother he feared he was boring me. Far from it. The breadth of his interests was fascinating, and his enthusiasm was captivating.

Kris responded well to the chemotherapy, with almost no side effects. He was good-natured and usually in good spirits, and made friends with all his caregivers. He was up walking around the last time I talked to him, the Friday of his second week in the hospital. The next day, his blood platelet count plummeted, and just as suddenly as he had received his diagnosis two weeks before, he died of internal hemorrhaging. Because I had ministered to him in his last days, and because I had hit it off with him as no other clergyperson had, his family asked me to do his funeral service. I who was only now emerging from my own grieving for my mother. I who was just as shocked as they were.

A couple of weeks after the funeral, as I lay sleeping in the little castle in the enchanted forest, I had another dream. This time I dreamed that I was driving on a road rather like Jericho Turnpike, with four lanes of traffic and a center turn lane and strip malls on either side of the road. I was driving a station wagon – I don't think I've ever actually driven a station wagon. Beside me was Kris, and in the back seat was my mother. Mom didn't say anything or interact with us, she just observed. As we drove along, Kris said that a particular strip mall we were coming to looked familiar to him. I pulled in and we parked there, and I listened to him tell me about what was familiar about this strip mall. Mom was watching and listening. It was as though she was getting to see me in action as a chaplain. It was as though Kris had said, "Hey, aren't you Paul's mom? Come with me, let me show you what he can do." I woke up from that dream with a peculiar sense of peace, and became tearful when contemplating it. I still do.

So what do you do about the places you remember, the people you've known before, things that might be your favorite things and then they might not? Well, you love them, of course, that's what you do. You love them, and they love you back, and they comfort you, and you grow with them and they change you again and again, and you change them. And they surround you like a cloud – not a foggy mist that hides things, but a mist that shows you the sunbeams. Not a cloud of obscurity but a cloud of witnesses who affirm you and attest to your truth. If you love them, and bless them, they bless you. So you love them. What else would you do?

So, you see, I do believe in ghosts. Not just spirits, but spooks! Those that haunt. They belong to my "direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves [me] to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life." They are a source of my UU faith. The writer of the New Testament book of Hebrews, in the eleventh chapter, says that "faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. ... By faith," he writes, "we understand that ... what is seen was made out of things which do not appear." He then lists the Biblical figures who in his judgment were paragons of faith –Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, even Samuel the unfriendly ghost. Then he concludes: "Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, É let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us ..." I understand that feeling. A cloud of witnesses – places I remember, people I've known, things that have meaning for me – but all in all, a cloud, a mist that reveals, a mysterious and very real presence in my life, many voices encouraging me, reminding me, warning me. And so, with so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding me, I am able to run with perseverance the race that is set before me, on this path of ministry that I am called to and have chosen.

And what about you? Do you have a cloud of witnesses surrounding you? Who is in it, or who would be in it if you had one? What do or would they say to you? And do you love them? I invite you to ponder these things in your heart. And may we each run with perseverance the race that is set before us, on the path we are called to and which we have chosen. So may it be. Amen.

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