I think it was an old Chinese proverb which suggested that “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step“, and that’s what I keep reminding myself as I start this sermon blog. I barely know where to start this first post of the journey, but one thing I do know is that the first step in fact started long ago.

Really, did that first step start with being born to a Lutheran Pastor and a teacher in Lutheran schools? Or was it the day I was baptised? Was it the day as a pre-teen that I started a project of making a synoptic study of Jesus’ parables without even realising that’s what I was doing? Or was it the day that I stepped up to studying Theology at the then Lutheran Seminary in Adelaide? Or was it that day in church before a service, praying for guidance, when I saw an image of myself kneeling at the altar,  when I saw hands being laid on me and a red stole being placed around my neck? My journey has been going on for a while, and this blog is only one more step along that path.

This path has led me to being called to be a chaplain in a Lutheran School 12 years ago, and have been speaking God’s word into the lives of thousands of young people regularly since then. I have also worked as a lay preacher on the odd occasions when our congregation has been without a pastor. I have been blessed to work in team ministries that have included both men and women, both lay and ordained, multi-denominational. I feel privileged that I have had opportunity to speak (and yes, preach) and to have journeyed with so many people as they discover and question God’s working in their lives.

And yet, I have to acknowledge a gaping hole in what I do. When a student or parent asks about baptism, I journey with them towards the congregation and our local pastor (or the pastor available in the vacancy). When I am taking a lay-led service I can’t speak with authority God’s words of forgiveness into people’s lives, I can only remind them of his promise. When I want to point to the altar and invite them to this amazing meal that God has given us to strengthen us for our journeys, I can only point to an empty space and ask them to come back next week or next month when a pastor can be present to lead. Our Church has been given incredible gifts to support and nurture God’s people for their journeys, and it troubles me that our current church practice makes it so much harder for these gifts to flourish.

I am a member of the Lutheran Church in Australia, and for a number of years our church has been discussing the issue of ordination, particularly whether Scripture rules for men only ordination or whether it allows for the ordination of both men and women. It is a topic that has deeply divided members of our church, and continues to threaten the unity of our Synod. In the past few weeks our Synod met and voted again on the issue, and yet again failed to reach the 2/3 majority needed to change our church’s practice on ordination. So we must maintain our current practice of ordaining only men as we try to see our way forward through the hurt and frustration that emerges.

After I heard the result of the vote, I was deeply troubled and depressed, and again began to question my own sense of God calling me to the ordained ministry and of my place in the Lutheran Church here in Australia. Until now, I have had a strong sense that my place is to remain here and continue to fulfill my current calling in the school and to keep reminding the church that there are still women like me in the church. But now I’m feeling more untethered, wondering if this call to ordination is meant to be fulfilled elsewhere. I don’t know the answer to that one yet…that will take time and prayerful conversation. But what I do know is that no matter where my church chooses to go in the next months and years, I want to do something positive for myself, to speak into a space that I can’t fill.

And so to this blog. I do not have a calling from my church to preach and teach God’s word in the divine service, to administer the sacraments or to speak God’s words of forgiveness with authority. I do not have a congregation to preach to or a pulpit to preach from. But over the next 52 weeks, from Reformation Day to Reformation Day, I am going to write the sermons I would have preached had I been called to preach them. Some may be a little rough and unfinished due to my current workload. They will be bereft of that final working of the Spirit that always seems to happen when I speak God’s word in a worship space. They will not necessarily be speaking into the lives of a particular group of people as would happen in a congregation. But nevertheless, these are the sermons that I may well have preached had I been ordained and working with a Lutheran congregation.

So, until the Lutheran Church in Australia sees its way through this ordination issue, these sermons sit here in silence and they remain unheard.