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After eight months of displacement, my books found a home last week. Much of their time in exile was spent in Harry Potter-like seclusion in a dark stairwell. In November, I stacked them against the walls of my new office figuring that in no time I would have a place to put them. That time arrived last Thursday. Having “culled the herd, ” I have reduced my library to what I think of as the bare minimum, grudging in my acknowledgement of how much easier and accessible the Internet, computer programs and terabyte hard drives have made my study and preparations. Bible references a and concordances are a click away as are archived copies of important theological journals, article s and chapters. We at NCC are also blessed with a pretty fair theological library, so that is close at hand as well. I have given the to mes I can’t live without fifty- six square feet of shelf space and no more. Some of the books were gifts from colleagues, congregants or family members. Some were purchases made back in seminary where we were encouraged to build a strong pastoral library. Brueggeman, Moltman, Barth, Tillich, Buttrick, Willimon are among the authors. Doubtful that many people inside , much less outside, a local congregation would recognize these names. There are a mixture of novels, philosophy and even some science. Alongside the thicker texts are practical materials about church life and leadership. These are mostly new, some read and some I have only thumbed through. There are hymnals, prayer books, devotional guides and liturgical materials for which I reach nearly every day. And then there are the cherished books of poetry to which I turn on those days when life seems to me far too prosaic.

There are also the cases of old sermons. For the past ten years, I have stored them on a computer. For the first fifteen kept manuscripts in file cabinets. My dilemma this week is what to do with a decade and half worth of old sermons. I started the day trying to toss them into the recycle bin. “ After all,” I told myself, “most sermons are like newspaper articles once the time has passed, so has much of the strength of the message.” I can’t say I read all 600 manuscripts carefully; give most of them at least a cursory look. As I dropped a manuscript into the recycle bin, a page fell out onto the floor. On it was this quote from Teddy Roosevelt:

“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out r where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcomings, who knows great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows in the end the high achievement of triumph and who at worst, if he fails while daring greatly, knows his place shall never be with those timid and cold souls who know neither victory or defeat.”

I have decided to hang onto some of the old sermons and have found an out-of-the- way place to put the several file boxes in which they are stored. I can’t say when the next time will be that I will o pen them up for a look. I can only say that it surprises me a little that they seem to have become a kind of symbol of ministry, of life in the church. It isn’t so much that words on the pages are important as much as the life – and lives have come to represent, and the stories that are told an d celebrated in our life together as the church.

By the way, I did throw away a fair number of those old manuscripts. One of you walked in to my office, saw me discarding old files and said, “Destroying the evidence?” “Of course not,” I said, “ You are the evidence.”

So it would seem,

Duayne