Well...Here We Are! | 8/2/26

• Reflection Questions

  1. When you think about a difficult season in your own life, what has helped you hold on to hope, and where have you seen God's faithfulness meet you in the middle of it?

  2. Lamentations reminds us that God's mercies are "new every morning." What would it look like for you to begin each day expecting fresh grace instead of carrying yesterday's burdens?

  3. Looking back on your journey of faith, how has your understanding of God's grace grown or changed over time?

  4. Everyone experiences seasons of transition. What transition are you navigating right now, and how can you intentionally look for God's presence and faithfulness in the midst of it?

  5. God's invitation is not only to receive grace but also to extend it. Who in your life may need to experience compassion, forgiveness, or encouragement from you this week?

Transcript:

Hi, everybody. It's so good to see you all today. You know, 9:30 — it is great to be with you. And you're never going to top my experience of my very first sermon at the earlier service, because — did you know we have a goat on campus today? And during my sermon, the goat decided to walk around all the glass windows of the chapel right here on campus. Yeah, of course that caused a great, great interruption. It really did. Anyway, anyway — hey, hi. It is so good to be among you here today.

Before I get started and get going, I really want to do a couple of things first, right off the bat. The first thing I want to do is to say how grateful I am to be here among you at Trinity United Methodist Church today, and how grateful I am to be following the ministry of my friend, the Reverend Steve Price. He has been nothing but gracious and warm and helpful to Margaret and myself as we've made our transition in recent weeks. And I want to give thanks for his decade of ministry here, and of course for that of Katherine before she was called to the district superintendency of the northwest district of the United Methodist Church here in Florida.

The second thing I want to do today — and you get to join in on this with me — I want to give thanks for our amazing pastor of care and discipleship, the Reverend Marisa Gertz, who for essentially the whole of the last month has taken the reins and held it all together here. And I just want to acknowledge Marisa and the gift that you are among us, and give thanks for your leadership in recent weeks.

You know, friends, as I considered what scripture reading we could share in today, in a first service with you all, I could really only land on one. It's a scripture taken from the Old Testament, from the Book of Lamentations, chapter three, verses twenty-one to twenty-four. Now, if you know the Book of Lamentations at all, you will know that they didn't get the title wrong — not even close — because this book really is like a litany of complaints, complaints about the destruction of Jerusalem, about the loss of the Temple in Jerusalem in and around the year 586 BCE. This book paints what is a rather hopeless picture of things, and it expresses the desperation and the pain of the author, or the poet, that is writing it. And then right in the middle of it, nestled right there in the center of this litany of complaints, at the end of one of the longer complaints, we find these words of persistent hope.

Hear the Word of Scripture.

But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope. The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, says my soul. Therefore I will hope in him.

Friends, this is the Word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.

Now, this is the fourth time in my preaching ministry that I've had to introduce myself as one of the new pastors in a new location. And you might think that that gets easier every time that I do it. But you would be wrong — you would be absolutely wrong about that — because things have actually come a long way in the last sixteen years since the very first time that I had to do this. You see, back then, compared to today, there was little to no social media. Facebook was just getting going. The idea that you could look someone up and find out whatever you can about them — well, it just wasn't a thing unless you were a private investigator or something like that, right? Neither was the idea that you could, if you wanted to, listen to the new pastor's old sermons on a website called YouTube. That seems like such a long time ago.

But the truth and reality is that back in the day, we all just had to wait and see how things would go on that very first Sunday together and thereafter. Now, since announcement Sunday back in April, quite a number of you here in the Trinity Church family have managed to find me on Facebook and add my account as a friend, which means that you have had the opportunity, if you wanted to, to look back through my life as far back as about 2009. Part of me shudders at that very thought. But another part of me considers that if you can look all the way back that far in my life, see all of those posts and all of that information, and still welcome me here warmly and graciously today — well, then there is great hope for our life together and our future journey together, at Trinity United Methodist Church.

Not all that said, the true reality is that most of you here have not actually added me as a friend on social media, and so you are actually just starting to get to know me here today. And so there are a few things that I just want to let you know about myself and share with you over the coming minutes, just by way of introduction.

Now, back whenever I was a wee boy going to church every Sunday — that's me, isn't that cute? Yeah — the preacher would always have what we know as the children's moment. Who remembers a children's moment in church? Yeah, you remember that? Good, good, good. This was a time when the children of the congregation would make their way to the front, and they would have a special interaction with the minister. Now, way back in those days, more often than not, the preacher at my home church would bring with them a plastic bag in which they had a bunch of mystery items that would become visual aids for the main point that they were trying to get across. So building upon that example, I brought with me today a — well, not so humble plastic bag. This is a shopping bag. This is Tesco, the chip of Northern Ireland. This is where I come from. This is the good stuff, okay? This is the good stuff. Anyway, in my bag today I brought a few items that I thought would just help you get to know a wee bit of my story, just a little bit more.

So shall we dive in, church? Let's do it. Dive in, church — that's good, because I didn't have a plan B if you said no, I didn't. Okay, so let me get into this. It's all out of order because, you know, I've done a service already today.

So right here, in this picture on screen there, this is me and Margaret on our wedding day. That's Margaret right there. We were married on September 11th, 2001. Yes, that September 11th. And that means two things. Yes, we got married on a Tuesday — it's because we couldn't get a Saturday, and Margaret's hairdresser didn't work on a Monday, so we went for the Tuesday. It also means that we have now been married for almost twenty-five years. Truth be told, and this is the truth, I have no idea how Margaret has put up with me for that long. I am forgetful, I am distracted most of the time, I'm rather untidy, and yet she still shows up every single day with full-on commitment, with unmatched strength, and with an endless supply of grace. Now, as you get to know our family in the days and weeks and months and years ahead, I'm pretty sure that you're going to learn that Margaret Charles is the best of us — and she's going to hit me for saying that, but I'm pointing her out right now. She's right over here in the pink, right there. You can get to know her.

Next we have these two. This is Evan and Jackson — I didn't have that picture in a frame, so this is them right here. They are our children. They are twenty-one and eighteen years old, respectively. They're out forging their own way in the world, with our support of course. And we're just proud of the young adults that they have become and are becoming. They are helpful and loyal and caring and loving, and they're an awful lot of fun to be around. And I'm pretty sure that they are by far the greatest thing that our marriage has produced. We just love them.

Now, I want to confess something to you on my first Sunday. There have been times in the last sixteen years when ministry in the local church has been my focus to the point where I maybe didn't give the right amount of attention at home. Now, that's a growing edge for me. I'm going to be working on that in our life together, and I hope you'll support me in that and pray for me in that, so that that's not the case again.

A few other things that I want to highlight for you about things that I love a lot. So first of all, I love sport. I love sport. And my first sporting love is rugby. So I brought a couple of things here today. Yeah, I played rugby for like twenty-five years. This is the Irish international rugby jersey — don't get any big ideas, this is a replica, I bought it in the store, I didn't wear it in a representative capacity — but yeah, this is the Ireland rugby top. And the game of rugby shaped me so much as a person, just like team sports shape so many of us who are involved in them. It's in that game that I learned what it was to be a part of a team, that I learned what it was to take leadership within a team. And yes, rugby's an awful rough sport, as the reputation goes, but it's so much fun. It is so much fun. And it taught me how to stand shoulder to shoulder with my teammates. It taught me how to stick together to a plan that we had made for a game, and it taught me how to keep going together when things weren't going according to plan or were not going our way.

Now I have another rugby jersey here — this is just my home team. This is Ballynahinch in County Down in Northern Ireland. That'll mean nothing to you at this stage, but you'll hear about it in the future.

Now my second sporting love is football — I mean actual football, with a round ball, where you use your feet. You know that one. Yes. I am an almost lifelong fan of a club called Liverpool Football Club. Have you ever heard of them? No? You're going to hear a lot about them in the time ahead. Now, most of my life it's been really difficult to be a Liverpool fan, but in recent years they've been getting a little bit better, so actually it hasn't been too bad recently. Now, Liverpool has this club motto, and it's taken from a Rodgers and Hammerstein piece of music from the musical Carousel. Have you ever heard of Carousel? Yeah. So the song "You'll Never Walk Alone" — that line is the club anthem. And I actually think that is such a wonderful expression of the gospel — that you'll never walk alone, that God is always with you. And that therefore means that it's evidence that God has clearly decided to be at work through Liverpool Football Club more than any of our rival clubs. And listen, don't worry, I don't do all my theology like that — but on that one I will. I'll die on that hill. Oh yeah.

The other thing I want to say is, listen, don't worry — I've got a big heart, and I think there's room in it for — well, just one more team. So here we go. Yeah, I thought you might like that.

Another thing that I'm into is music. Music's in my blood — it's deep in my blood. I grew up hearing my grandfather play the organ in our local church back in the day. I grew up hearing my dad play the piano at home pretty much every day of life, and then he also went on to become the organist in our home church. I love to sing, I love to mess around on guitar, and I'm just about talented enough to make anything sound terrible on the piano. My musical tastes are quite eclectic — I can listen to anything as long as it's done well. I brought another t-shirt just to represent the music thing here. Yeah, it's this one right here. We went to see Billy Joel, the piano man himself. Yeah, that was a great, great evening out.

Let me pick my bag up right here. So another thing that's important to me is — well, you can tell from my accent that I'm not from around these parts, can't you? Yeah, I hope so. You'll get used to it. Margaret and I are immigrants. We're immigrants. We moved here from very beautiful Northern Ireland back in 2013, after a series of doors opened up for us. We moved here way back then, and we love our life here. We actually became citizens of the United States in 2023. We love our life here, but we also love our homeland too, and it's important to us. And so over the years ahead, you're probably going to hear an awful lot of stories about that little country. It's only 100 miles east to west and 100 miles north to south, but it's got some amazing stories to tell, and hopefully I'll get to share some of them with you. Maybe some of you will take an opportunity to travel there with Margaret and myself as well, when we take our groups.

I want to tell you about my testimony in Christian faith. I became a Christian when I was just a few days short of my eighteenth birthday. The night before that morning, I had actually been involved in an almost fatal car accident in which I tore a hole in my diaphragm and ruptured my spleen. My life was literally saved that night by the amazing doctors and nurses at one of our local hospitals. Now, my simple understanding of my Christian upbringing to that point was that if my life had ended the night before — well, I just would not have been ready to meet my maker. Did you ever hear that phrase? Yeah. It just wasn't. And so when I woke up in the hospital bed the next day, I did the only thing that I knew to do with that specific thought. I closed my eyes and I offered a prayer, and I asked the Lord Jesus to move into my life and to come into my heart. That was the language that I knew and was aware of. And I had no clue what I was doing when I did that — no clue at all. I kind of expected this feeling to wash over me. It didn't. It really didn't. And since then, I've continued on that journey of Christian faith. I have learned an awful lot more. I have unlearned a lot of things. I've had high highs along the way, and I've had many low lows as well. But one thing that I have learned through it all, that I can take to the bank in terms of my understanding of the Christian faith, is this: that God's grace abounds every single day. Amen. That is the truth. That is the truth.

I am a follower of Jesus Christ. This was given to me when we left our last church, so I thought that was a good representation — let's put it in there.

The other thing you need to know about me is that I'm a United Methodist. I'm a United Methodist. I was born into a family of Irish Methodists. I was baptized and catechized in a Methodist church in Northern Ireland. And aside from a very brief excursion to a non-denominational church when I started out at college, I have only ever worshiped, served, and led in either Irish Methodist churches or United Methodist churches here in Florida. What you need to know about that is I am remarkably proud of who we are as United Methodist followers of Jesus Christ. I am proud of our rich emphasis on the unconditional love and scandalous grace of God and its power to transform any life. And I am proud of our open communion table, to which all people are welcome. And I am also remarkably proud of our emphasis as United Methodists on love for neighbor, and on the ministries of mercy and justice that seek the transformation of the world. I'm proud of all of those things.

Now, if you've been paying attention in recent years, you will know that we've had a rough season in the United Methodist Church, from which we continue to bear some scars. But, friends, I want you to hear loud and clear from me today as I arrive among you that I remain utterly convinced that God is good all the time, and that the Lord Jesus is able and is eagerly ready to forgive us our sins, to heal our brokenness, and to lead us into new life. And I am also convinced that the fire of the Holy Spirit still burns bright among us in the United Methodist Church, empowering us to do all the good we can in our local community and beyond. God has not done with the people called United Methodist. Amen. God has not done with the people called United Methodist. And the very, very best part of that good news is this: that you and me — we get to be a part of what God is doing through the United Methodist Church, moving into the future. I say it all the time: it is a great time to be a United Methodist follower of Jesus Christ.

There's one more thing that I want to tell you about myself, and I think that this is the most important part of what I can say to you all here today. And that's why I chose to share with you in this introductory sermon the scripture passage from Lamentations. The writer of these poems in Lamentations is crying out to God because the defining place in his or her life of faith — that is Jerusalem and the temple — this defining place has been overrun and has been utterly destroyed and reduced to rubble by Babylonian forces.

Now, humor me for a second. Close your eyes. I want you to think of the place for you that is most special and most treasured in your journey of faith. It might be this church — Trinity United Methodist Church. Or maybe you are one of those ones for whom Warren Willis Camp in the Florida Conference is a special place. This place is any thin place where the distance between heaven and earth feels small, a place where you have experienced the closeness of God in a way that has changed you and set your life on a new path. Have you got that place?

Now imagine that place being lost, seemingly forever. You can open your eyes again. When you think that through, then maybe you can relate to the expressions of grief and lament that this writer is making in this book. Maybe you can understand the painful loss being communicated in these writings. It is quite hard reading to get through this book, and we the readers are often left, as we journey through it, wondering if there's any hope at all.

You know, my mother passed away in 2023, almost one year to the day after my father had passed away. That was a profoundly difficult time, and obviously being so far away from home made it hard for me to be there with her a lot as she journeyed towards the end of her earthly life. But I did get to make a few trips during that year. One of them was a couple of months before her time finally came. It was a very difficult time and I was just feeling heavy with this journey. I decided, before I would visit her that day, that I'd go out for a run. And as I was running along this little country road in rural Northern Ireland, a song came to me — a worship song from way back in my memory bank.

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning, new every morning. Great is your faithfulness, O Lord. Great is your faithfulness.

Friends, I'm excited to get to know all of you in the days ahead. And what I want you to know is that in that moment, in the most difficult season of my life, those words started to speak to me and remind me that God's grace and God's faithfulness were going to be enough that day for me. They were going to be enough that day for me, and they were going to be everything that I needed that day and every day thereafter.

And new friends, I want you to hear that from me today. It's going to be the message that you hear again and again and again — that the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, that God's mercies never come to an end, and that God's faithfulness towards us is great. And that is always, always, always enough. The grace of God is always sufficient to bring all of us through all of the things — the very hardest of our days and the very toughest of our transitions.

And so, friends, as we step into this brand-new chapter together, as we chart the days ahead as pastor and people, as we stand shoulder to shoulder, I want to say to you that we don't have to carry the future on our own shoulders alone. Why? Because great is God's faithfulness. God's grace is enough for today, and it's going to be enough for tomorrow. And maybe even this is true — that the best is still yet to come as we journey forward together. Amen.

Friends, I'm excited to get to know you and for you to get to know me too. And you know, some of that can happen here on Sunday mornings, of course it can — it can happen as we greet each other before a service, or as we share a kind word on the way out, or even as you listen to some of the stories that I'll tell you from the front here. But the very best way for us to get to know each other, for me to get to know you, is for us to spend a few moments together. And so I want to invite you to take some time with me in the weeks and months ahead. Over the coming months, I'm going to be opening up a few thirty-minute appointments in my calendar every single week, and I'd like you to take one of those if you're interested. If you would like to take me up on that invitation, I want you to do that either by calling into the office and speaking to Kimberly, or by emailing her directly, and she'll put you into one of those slots that we've set aside through the week. But this is a time to really listen to one another, to get to know each other's hearts, and to work out what we can hear God saying through those conversations. And I do hope that you'll take me up on that invitation and let me hear some of your story as we get to know each other.

One other thing that I want you to know about me is that I absolutely love the part of my calling that invites me to preside, alongside my clergy brothers and sisters in the Florida Conference, at the sacrament of Holy Communion. Do you ever just stop and think about the fact that this table has been opened up so that you can have a remembrance of God's great love for you, and the forgiveness of your sins, and the invitation to rise up and walk in newness of life? When you stop for a moment and think about that, it's staggering that we get to do that. And here at Trinity, we get to do that every single week in all of our services. I'm so excited about that.

And one of the components of accepting that invitation is taking some time just to ready ourselves for that. And one of the best ways we can do that is to pray a prayer of confession and to take time to bring ourselves before God. And so I'm going to invite you to do that now. I'm going to lead us collectively in a prayer of confession. I'm going to leave a moment of silence in which you might want to bring your own silent prayer of confession before God. And then we're going to hear God's gracious word of forgiveness for God's people. So would you bow your heads and pray with me for a second?

O gracious God, we do give thanks for the goodness of this good news, for the warmth of the welcome that we get to experience at this table. And we do not approach it unaware of ourselves, unaware of our own flaws or shortcomings, the mistakes we've made along the way, the regrets that we have. We're reminded in the Scripture that when we bring those regrets, when we bring these confessions before you, you are good — you hear them, and you forgive us our sins, and you breathe into us this newness of life. And so in these moments, we bring ourselves humbly before you, seeking your forgiveness.

And so, in a moment of silence, we offer our own personal prayers of confession.

Friends, hear the good news today. Christ died for us while we were yet sinners, and that proves God's love towards us. And so I announce to us, on behalf of the Lord: your sins are forgiven. Let's say together — thanks be to God. Thanks be to God.