“The Christmas Wilderness”

Over at Our Redeemer, Pastor Shulz decided to take a few days off this week – kind of unusual for him at this time of the year, because it’s such a busy time around the church. It’s not that he’s exactly ready for Christmas. In fact, quite the opposite. The Annual Meeting is coming up, and the church secretary, Lois Martinsen, fell on the ice last week and broke her arm, and while Pastor Shulz has managed to get people to cover the office, no one seems to want to tackle getting the Annual Report out, so he’s doing it himself. This week is the Children’s Christmas Pageant, so at least he doesn’t have to get a sermon ready, but he does have to get a story ready for the Children’s Christmas Eve Service, and a sermon ready for the Christmas Eve Candlelight Service, both of which are only two weeks away, and so far he’s drawing blanks on both accounts. The choir cantata is next week, which seems like an occasion for another week without a sermon, except that Lou Stettler, the choir director, got the idea that there should be some running commentary connecting the pieces of music he chose - a kind of story line - and elected Pastor Shulz to write it. “I don’t want it to just be the Christmas story,” he told Pastor Shulz last week. “That’s for Christmas Eve. I want it to be relevant to the people in this congregation, as they are getting ready for Christmas – maybe a modern story of a family getting ready to celebrate Christmas.” Well, Pastor Shulz is drawing a blank on that one too, right now.

Anyway, he’s been feeling a lot of pressure this holiday season, what with all the writing he has to do, in addition to the services themselves, and all the celebrations of Christmas that he’s expected to attend and, in most cases, lead. And then there are all the extra drop-ins, looking to have a few moments of his time, or a few dollars from his wallet.

The occasion for his taking a few days off was the text for Sunday - one of those "John the Baptist" texts. We always get a double dose of John this time of the year, which, I guess, is appropriate, since Jesus calls him, "the greatest of the prophets." But trying to find new things to say about someone whose message is simply, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near," is a bit daunting. Pastor Shulz is usually glad for the cantata and the children's service. John's is a wilderness that he feels he doesn't need to visit too often.

But wildernesses, while they can be rather dry places, are also places that call us back to our roots. Israel, when it was tempted to leave Yahweh, their god, was always called by the prophets to remember the wilderness, and to return there occasionally, so that they could be purified, and return a stronger, more focused people. And that's what Pastor Shulz seems to feel the need for, right now. So he's taking off a few days, to return to Pittsburgh, to the old family homestead, to his roots. He doesn't have much family there any longer - just his Aunt Jenny, who is ninety-one, and is in the Lutheran home. He'll visit her, but he's not going there for her. He's planning to take a ride on the Duquesne Incline, where he first met his wife, and hit the Strip District, and maybe pick up a few things at the Italian Market, maybe some biscotti at Enrico's, and a fish sandwich at Benkewick's. In Pittsburgh, it seems that restaurants are always judged by the size of their fish sandwich - which is interesting for a land-locked town, it seems to him. If the fish isn't at least as big as your plate, it's not a restaurant that's going to be around very long. But at , you get two planks of fish - each about the size of a large serving platter. So that's where lunch will be. Then he'll wander around town - down to see the windows at Lazarus, which used to be Kaufmans, and used to have animated displays that wrapped around the entire store, and people used to stand in lines that were four or five deep, moving slowly around the block, like a moving sidewalk in slow motion. There was always room for the kids up front, near the windows, and no one seemed to worry about their kids getting lost in the crowd. And wander through Market Square, and buy a large German pretzel, the big soft ones, with some mustard, from a street vendor, just like when he was a kid.

The animated display was a thing of the past. Now it was just clothes on manikins, just like every other place in town, although there was one window still reserved for a Christmas display: a family, happily shopping, obviously at Lazarus, with everyone buying something - even the family dog apparently was in on the act. Pastor Shulz's godfather once had a display in the window here - an old German, fresh from the old country, who lived in the city but never got around to putting in indoor plumbing, he had a display of animated carved figures, all run by weights and watch chains, to which he added a new figure every year. He had skiers shooting down a mountain, disappearing into a group of trees; skaters went round and round on a small lake; a man rowing a canoe would tip over when a Laurelai winked. All on weights and watch chains. When he died, no one could figure out how to put it together again, and it disappeared.

One of the things that wasn't around when he was a kid, was the display of Santa Clauses at PPG Place. When he was a kid, it was an area that was full of small shops. One of them, a silver and gold plating shop, was owned by a man in the congregation where he grew up. He even worked there one summer, in tenth grade. Fred Reisle was the owner - a nice guy that always had an angle, who used his connection to the Pittsburgh Diocese to buy everything from tires to slot machines. The summer Pastor Shulz worked for Fred was the year that they tore down one of the old office buildings - a building with large slabs of imported marble in the entryway. Fred decided that there must be some use for the marble, so he bought an old hearse, and he, his son, and Pastor Shulz went into the old building, and hauled out all of the marble, along with a large ventilation fan, and loaded it into the hearse. As they went through town, the police stopped traffic when they saw the hearse, to let it through, supposing it to be on another kind of business. Anyway, Fred couldn't find any buyers for the marble, but had a great time encasing things in it - like the vestibule at church, which suddenly resembled more of an office building than a church. He even had some of it cut into thin slabs, drilled holes in it, and put it on top of the altar rail, to hold the little glasses of communion wine.

It will be a good couple of days for Pastor Shulz and, at the end, he'll visit Jenny, and talk about old times - the only times she remembers any more. It will be a good trip, and he'll come back, rejuvenated, full of stories to share, and with a few words from God for the congregation to boot.

Every now and then, all of us need to go back - back to the wilderness, the place where our life began, where we were nurtured, and learned who we were. We can't know where we are headed, unless we know where we came from.

And that's what's happening over at Our Redeemer Lutheran Church, where the Reverend George Shulz is the pastor - a little parish, not very far from here, which seems to not be much in the eyes of most folks, but which is infinitely precious in the eyes of God.