Ode to the Master Gardener | 6/14/26
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The sermon lifted up the idea that no single pastor came with all the gifts — and that the people of a congregation rise up with their own gifts to fill in what's needed. Where do you see your own gifts showing up in the life of your church or community, and are there gifts you haven't yet offered?
Jimmy Crook's gift to Trinity wasn't building programs or casting vision — it was simply wrapping his arms around a grieving congregation and holding on. Who has been that kind of presence for you in a hard season, and have you ever been that person for someone else?
The phrase "do all the good you can" is simple enough to put on a sign, but genuinely living it out is another thing entirely. Where in your everyday life do you feel the most traction when it comes to actually doing good, and where do you feel the most resistance?
Looking back over your own life, where can you see now, perhaps more clearly than you could at the time, that God was at work even in a season that felt uncertain or difficult?
Transcript:
Today I preach my next to last sermon here with you all.
Several months ago, Marisa and I were doing some sermon planning for these first several months of 2026 and came up with a plan that had me doing this week and next week. So quite a while ago, I began thinking about what I will preach on my last two Sundays here, and where I landed was that it would be a good time to first look back and to remember where God has been faithful — with both thanks and praise — and then to take an opportunity to look ahead with hope and expectation. So today is our opportunity to look back, and next week will be our opportunity to look ahead.
To help us remember and to help us do that with thanksgiving and praise, we're going to listen in on a part of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, in the third chapter. And so I invite you to follow along as I read these verses for us.
After all, what is Apollos? What is Paul? They are servants who helped you to believe. Each one had a role given to them by the Lord. I, Paul, planted. Apollos watered. But God made it grow. Because of this, neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but the only one who is anything is God, who makes it grow. The one who plants and the one who waters work together, but each one will receive their own reward for their own labor. We are God's coworkers, and you are God's field. God's building.
And then continuing with verse 21:
So then no one should brag about human beings. Everything belongs to you — Paul, Apollos, Cephas, the world, life, death, things in the present, things in the future. Everything belongs to you, but you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.
This is the Word of God for the people of God. And God's people say, thanks be to God. Would you pray with me?
Come, Holy Spirit, and breathe life into the words that I speak, that they might carry a word from you into our hearts and lives this morning. Amen.
In June 1959, Reverend Lewis, a retired minister from the Holston Conference in Tennessee, was sent to organize a new church in the northwest section of Gainesville, Florida. Recently we came across — rediscovered, if you will — a portrait of Reverend W.H. Lewis, the first senior pastor of Trinity. Now, since rediscovering this portrait, we've been having a little fun with him. Reverend Lewis is showing up in different places around campus where he can keep an eye on how things are going at this church that he helped start all those years ago. So you never know where he might turn up — he might show up somewhere where you are and give you a little surprise along the way. But make no mistake, he's keeping an eye on things.
One of the things that caught my attention in reading through some history this past week is that when Lewis came here to serve in 1959, he was retired. This man who had retired said yes to coming and doing a new church start. Now, some of you know that way back in the beginning of my ministry in this conference, Katherine and I were sent to do a new church start. I know what that's like. I know the kind of investment that it requires, the commitment. And God bless Lewis for saying yes in his retirement to come and do a new thing here in Gainesville, Florida.
From the beginning, pastors have come to Trinity who may not have ever imagined themselves being here, but who said yes to following the call. During those early years when Reverend Lewis was the pastor, Trinity bought its first property. As I have read in one of the documents kept here, the church purchased five acres from a dairy farmer — and get this, in the description it says "way out in the country." Some of you know where that property was. Way out in the country was on Northwest Eighth Avenue, right beside Littlewood Elementary School. I just found out, on the way as someone was leaving the 9:30 service a few moments ago, that the reason Littlewood was called Littlewood is because it was the little school out in the woods. How about that? So this church was way out in the country, and Trinity began gathering people. And within those first few years, while Reverend Lewis was still here, they built their first space for worshiping as a community on that property.
Other senior pastors came after Reverend Lewis — the Reverend Bob Temple, the Reverend Dale Harward, the Reverend Bill Tiffin, the Reverend Doctor Dean Martin, the Reverend Doctor Jimmy Crook, the Reverend Doctor Dan Johnson. Y'all noticing a pattern with those last three? You had some very highly educated people before we showed up. And then Reverend Katherine Price and Steve Price, ten years ago. In the first fifteen years, by the way, all of those folks who have served Trinity in the past as senior or lead pastor are on the back wall over there, alongside the section of the wall that has people who have gone into ministry who heard their calling here as a part of this church.
In the first fifteen years of Trinity's existence, there were four pastoral changes. In the last fifty-two years since then, there have also been four pastoral changes — four pastoral changes in fifty-two years. One of the blessings that has come along with long-term pastorates is the opportunity for a pastor and a congregation to form deep, meaningful relationships and a chance to work together to craft a shared vision for how this congregation could have an impact in the community, and enough time for the pastor's gifts and skills to be more fully utilized because of the benefit of being able to stay in a particular context for the long haul. Both Trinity and the larger community have benefited over the years because of that, and perhaps particularly from a season of forty-two years — the forty-two years just before we got here in 2016, thirty-six of which were pastored by two men here, Dean Martin and Dan Johnson. The impact of both of those pastors on the life of this church and community was immense.
When we were just getting started in 2016, one of the things that we did was to have home gatherings. Some of you attended one of those gatherings — these were in people's living rooms with ten to twelve to fifteen people, an opportunity just to visit and get to know one another, and also an opportunity for us to hear the stories of what mattered to you, to remember some of the things that had happened during your time as a part of this church. And without fail, at just about every one of those gatherings, the names of both Dean Martin and Dan Johnson came up, and the ways in which their ministry had helped shape the life of this church. You were grateful for all of the things that they had done during their time here.
Trinity built new sanctuaries on two different campuses under their leadership — in 1977 on the Northwest Eighth Avenue campus under Dean's leadership, and in 1999 here on this campus under Dan Johnson's leadership. This past week I found something I'd never seen before. I went rummaging on campus — it was so much fun — and I found a closet I never knew existed in the ten years I've been here. And in that space I found a chart. It's a sketch of what would be the sanctuary at the old campus. In the sketch you can see every space where a pew would be installed. You can see where the pulpit would be, where the chairs behind the pulpit would be, the chairs in the choir loft, the piano, the organ, the balcony, and some other accessories. And beside every item there's a price tag for what it would cost to supply those things that would become a part of that sanctuary. What an exciting time that must have been — this church that had been meeting for some years by that time, to get to the point where they would finally build this long-term sanctuary that would be a long-term home for them.
And on this chart are the names of the folks who pledged, written in ink pen. Some of these names I recognize — some of them are names that have still been around during my time here at Trinity. Tom and Dorothy Filmer, the Prison family, Doug and Peggy Zandt, Bill and Anne Knight, Ron and Geraldine Ward. What a wonderful gift to find. What a legacy of those who came before us and committed to being a part of something that God was doing. And how grateful we are for the leadership of Reverend Dean Martin during that time — a man who, as we heard in those home gatherings, influenced so many with his preaching, the sermons that he brought to that space that had an impact.
One of the central features of the sanctuary on Eighth Avenue was something that, if you can see it, you might recognize. The sanctuary was opened for worship in early December of 1977. On Christmas Day, 1977, the Gainesville Sun ran a full page about that new sanctuary. Some of you knew this, but I bet some of you didn't — that the stained glass window that is here in this worship space made the journey with the people of Trinity from there to here. It was one of the things that it was important to hold on to.
Some years later, another article ran in the Gainesville Sun — this one at a time when this church, under Dan's leadership, made an important stance for goodness, for human decency, for respecting all of human life around us, and had an interfaith gathering in this very worship space that welcomed everybody from the community in to say, "You belong here. We are all God's children together." The impact of the ministries of both Dean and Dan was immense.
And between the two of them, a man came to serve with you all by the name of Jimmy Crook. Jimmy came and offered a bridge of pastoral care that Trinity needed. Some of you know this story, but others perhaps don't. In 1987, having served here for thirteen years at the time and likely anticipating that he would serve here for many more years, Dean Martin was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, and a year later he died while still serving this congregation. It was devastating. I found an article from not long after he was diagnosed — a writer for the Gainesville Sun came and interviewed Dean — and this sentence in that article speaks to the larger-than-life figure that Dean was, not only in this church but in this community: "Martin is the nominee of a lot of people as Gainesville's most valuable and most loved citizen."
It was a devastating time for Trinity, and Jimmy came. Some of you have described him as the grandfatherly figure who came and wrapped his arms around you all and held on and cared for you in that season of grief, gave you space to acknowledge your loss and to heal, and to be ready to move into a new season — a new season that would come with Dan. But in that interim period, not only did he care for you with loving arms, he also offered his leadership and encouragement in walking alongside you as you went through the discernment process for purchasing a new piece of property where you could plant dreams for the future. Because that five-acre piece that you bought from the dairy farmer way out in the country wasn't way out in the country anymore, and you had run out of room there. You needed more space to do the things that God was calling you to do. And so it was during that time, when Jimmy was here with you, that Trinity made the investment in this property — so that when Dan got here to be among you, you could work together to build this space, to come home to this campus where you would create a welcome for others who would come in the years after.
These pastors who served you — their influence was immense. And it's no wonder that you found meaningful ways to remember their legacies here on this campus in tangible expressions: the Dean Martin Prayer Room in the education building, Jimmy Crook Way — the drive that brings you into campus — and the bronze Fishers of Men statue out front that was unveiled just before Dan's retirement as an acknowledgment of the impact of his leadership among you.
How blessed Trinity has been through the past. How grateful, then, were Katherine and I to have the privilege and the honor of coming to serve alongside you ten years ago. Who could have imagined — we certainly didn't anticipate it — that we would get the opportunity to come back to the church where Katherine had been formed in the faith back in those Eighth Avenue days, and that some of the people who nurtured her in that faith would be people sitting right out here as we began to preach Sunday after Sunday. What a gift that was for us, and how grateful we are to this community for embracing us and welcoming us so kindly and warmly.
As I look back over these past ten years, I'll leave it to historians to come later to decide what the impact of that looks like. But there are three phrases that I think have come to mean something important to us in these recent years that I just want to lift up today, because I'm grateful for the work that we've done together in embracing these phrases as a framework for how we will be Christ followers in our current time.
The first is the phrase that comes from the beginning of the vision statement: that we are called to be a courageous witness for Christ. Faith takes courage, because sometimes faith means standing up and showing up for what's right and what's good and what's decent, and what acknowledges the presence of God in one another and in the stranger and in the many, many children of God who are beyond our doors and walls in our community. And over these last few years, we've been working and growing on what it means to offer that courageous witness. We have been building resilience, if you will, as people of faith, so that we might lean into the first general rule of what it means to be Methodist — to do no harm to one another, and to do no harm to our siblings with whom we share life in the community.
The second phrase that comes to mind is one that isn't original to us, but it's one that we surely have latched on to in recent years. It comes from our founder, John Wesley: do all the good you can. And under that banner, we have expanded our impact as we have focused on ways to partner with organizations and ministries that are involved in long-term, sustainable, transformative ministry. One of those is our own Faith Mission, a ministry that we get to be a part of that blesses the lives of all who are involved. And I hope that in addition to how we get to do all the good we can together, you are reminded every time you leave this campus — when you see that sign on your way out — to do all the good you can, wherever you show up in the world in the week ahead.
Lastly, there's a phrase that we say every week in worship. Again, it's one that preceded our time here, but one that in these recent years I think has come to mean even more for us as we say it when we come into this space: "Welcome home. It's great to be home." When we hear that phrase, it's an invitation to have our hearts enlarged, because who knows who it will be that comes in the door today, or next Sunday, or the Sunday after, or sometime during the week — looking for some hope, looking for some encouragement, looking for someplace where the people who show up there value them and appreciate them and honor them as persons of sacred worth, just because they are another child of God. That should be the way it is for all of us, right? And so when we say "Welcome home, it's great to be home," it's our way of continuing to enlarge our hearts, to make room for all of God's children among us.
Sixty-seven years. Nine senior pastors who've been appointed to serve here. Each one of us, I feel certain, came — in the words of Paul's letter to the Corinthians today — as servants who helped you to believe. That's certainly been our hope and desire in coming to be among you, that through our ministries faith might grow, and responding and living out faith might become more and more an expression of who we are. None of us have been perfect. All of us came with some gifts. None of us came with all the gifts — which is part of the beauty of the Body of Christ, that alongside the gifts of a particular pastor at a particular time, the people of God rise up with their own gifts and participate in what God wants to do among them. More about that next week.
But as we look back, we can surely see where God has been at work all along, and we can be reminded that it is God who is always the one at work among us, doing the thing. Paul helps us not to get too boastful and to remember to put the focus where the focus belongs when he says, "Neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but the only one who is anything is God, who makes it grow." Through all of these sixty-seven years, God has been at work through the pastors and the people of this community of faith, who together have shared their gifts so that God's purposes might be fulfilled through this church.
And so now you all can look forward to turning the page to a new time, a new season, with a new pastor. And I am so excited for you all! I am so excited about what is in store for you coming down the road as Charlie Charles comes to be your lead pastor. Together you all will be blessed. Together ministry will happen. Together you all will shape a vision for the next season of ministry. And we know that this will happen because the same God who has been faithful all along in seeing you through the past sixty-seven years will see you into the future, as you trust that God to do so.
So give thanks. Be grateful for what has already been, and get ready to look ahead for what is yet to come — by the power of the work of the Holy Spirit in you and in this church. Thanks be to God.
Amen.