Here We Go Again…

By Bishop Brian Maas

It’s September, which means a whole lot of renewal is going on. A new school year starts. Again. A new congregational program year starts. Again. The crops are ripening. Again. The Cornhuskers have a new football coach. Again.

So it goes. The new is familiar, and the familiar is new, as the cycle of the year runs its course.

This September I’m especially aware of the completion of one cycle and the start of another. I entered this role September 1, 2012, and I’ve now just begun a second term. Unlike six years ago, virtually nothing changed on September 1, 2018. Yet something did change. It very much feels like something has concluded, and something new has begun. Like advancing from one grade to the next, the faces remain the same, even the subjects are familiar, but it feels like there is new potential and opportunity in the air.

I have to confess that, like the wide-eyed middle schooler filled with hope and expectation (and dread), eager to dive into what’s ahead without really knowing what’s coming, I am looking ahead with a great deal of anticipation, and with no small amount of anxiety.

My classmates—the staff, rostered ministers, members of the Nebraska Synod—are mostly the same, and their familiarity is a source of confidence. The courses—pastoring, preaching, presiding, preparing, administrating, mediating, curating and the rest—are familiar, but there are always the surprises of the advanced courses (popularly known as “you can’t make this stuff up!”). The Holy Spirit’s faculty—discernment, experience, prayer, failure, insight, success, memory, hope and all the rest—are expert but sometimes demanding and not always easy to understand.

If the bishop’s office really is a school, then I’ve just been through the elementary years—which sounds about right. What I knew headed into first grade compared to what I knew heading into seventh grade just about parallels my experience of the last six years. Thank God for holy ignorance—I’d have given more pause to being open to this call.

Then again, when I remember what junior high was like, those tumultuous years of transition, I’m not sure I care for the parallel. Yet it feels a little real. For all the knowledge and experience gained in the last six years, the culture and the times and plain old human nature ensure that there’s a lot of the unknown yet ahead, and some of it will doubtless be challenging, possibly overwhelming.

But I’m in a great class—the Nebraska Synod! We continue to learn and grow, together. And the faculty of the Holy Spirit is there as much to support as to demand, as much to encourage as to teach. So here we go again.

This isn’t only a personal journey, and it’s not about my experience of it. My hope in these words is to invite you to a shared glimpse of one perception of what being church and growing as disciples is like. There are so many others.

Yet all of us enter September with an awareness of life’s cycles, the experience of “here we go again.” Some of us experience that as excitement, others as dread. My prayer would be that we acknowledge the dread fearlessly, and focus on the excitement; that we wouldn’t look to the pages and pages of life already written, but to those beautiful blank sheets of life yet to be filled. There’s more to learn, more to live, more to love—together.

Thank you, Lord, for the cycles of life and the certainty of your presence in them. Thank you for the promise of all that is yet to come. Give us the grace and courage to learn as we live, and the assurance and hope to say with joy, Here we go again!