Learning from one another

BOULDER, Colorado — With Psalm 78:1-7 and Ruth 1:8-17 as her preaching texts, the Rev. Dr. Lorraine Leist brought the Presbyterian Older Adult Ministries Network conference to a thoughtful and hopeful conclusion Friday during closing worship.

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“I am struck by the richness of all we have experienced here together,” said Leist, the associate pastor for congregational care and older adults at Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church in Denver. Scripture echoes these themes,” she said, “the generations learning from one another, always drawing us deeper into God’s love.”

The psalmist “invites us to listen to the triumphs of faith and failures as well,” she said. “These truths are not to be hidden, but passed down.”

In our churches, older members might confess that “we stayed silent when we should have marched,” she said. “Shared ministry comes from such honesty.” It’s “faith informing justice.”

Younger members can learn the practical skills that were required of their forebears to create victory gardens, for example, and of “making do.” Those skills can help young people who see responding to climate change “as a spiritual imperative.”

Truth-telling “can feel heavy,” Leist said, “but Psalm 78 calls us to speak honestly so hope can take root and every generation might see their hope in God.”

We also need the gift that Ruth offers us: an expansive love that bridges generations, Leist noted. Ruth’s mother-in-law, Naomi, “refuses to sugarcoat her reality,” and her daughters-in-law “choose the path that each needs”: Orpah electing to take the path toward home, and Ruth opting for a different path, crossing “boundaries of culture, family and nation. She embraces an expansive love.”

More than just a show of personal loyalty, Ruth’s choice “is a pivot in salvation history,” according to Leist, securing David’s line “and, in a Christian reading, preparing the way for Jesus. She shows us God’s purposes can unfold in the very places where human boundaries break open.”

Younger church members have many gifts to offer the church, including “questioning the binaries that shape identity — male and female, insider and outsider, even the secular and the sacred,” Leist said. “Their truth-telling challenges us not to cling to neat categories, but to embrace the fullness of God’s Creation.”

As a child, Leist would listen to her mother’s stories about the life of Leist’s grandmother, who lived on a farm in southern Indiana that had no running water. The farm was miles from the nearest store, and family members went to town once a year to purchase new shoes. “She could mend anything and find a use for things that people threw away,” Leist said of her grandmother. “Such resilience matters today.”

These kinds of stories “remind us that we too can adapt, persist and remain faithful.”

New opportunities emerge from such an exchange, she said. “Different generations collaborate to create something neither could have done alone,” she said. “May our younger generations share their imagination, not be afraid to push boundaries, and challenge assumptions that have kept us in the past. May we all remind each other that where you go, I will go.”

“May we leave this place embracing hope and walking together in the wide, wide hope of God,” Leist said.

At the conclusion of the service, Leist blessed those gathered with words that included this charge: “Friends, as you go forth from this place, may you remember to be brave enough to tell the truth and receive God’s boundary-crossing love, so we can build bridges together. Go with God’s peace. Amen.”