On Bob Barker

I was half-awake on Friday morning. After spending the week at my New Pastors' Group (and staying up late every night), I was beat. I dragged myself out of bed and upstairs to work on my barely-started sermon...a sermon that I was intending to be on the subject of embracing change...but I was in no mood to write. As she left for work, Julie reminded me of something that had slipped my mind: "Today's Bob Barker's last show...you should watch it." I said good-bye, gave her a hug, and said thank you. She was out the door...and I was alone.

Sure enough, I "wrote" until 10:00 and made my way downstairs. I hadn't watched The Price is Right in probably 5 years...but I wanted to watch television history. I plopped myself down on the sofa and turned the television to channel 4...and was greeted by that same old music, those same crazy graphics, and that same old Bob Barker. And, along with them, something totally unexpected...

A surprising amount of emotion.

For the first 10-15 years of my life, when people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would say (without hesitation): "A game show host." And The Price Is Right, as everybody knows, is the king of all game shows. I would watch it any chance I could get and then quickly run upstairs to try to recreate the games using playing cards on our sofa. Part of the benefit of missing school on a sick day or snow day? I got to see The Price is Right. I was a fan. And that has continued, to slightly lesser degrees, even since. I remember watching The Price is Right in the Union at college and getting oh-so-close to going to it live for my bachelor party (Bob was having surgery at the time). I've always loved it...

And as I watched on Friday I realized that a big reason it still makes me feel good is that it hasn't changed. They played the game with the car and the seven one dollar bills on Friday, and Plinko, and they spun the big wheel...all games I tried to recreate when I was still learning to write cursive letters. The music, the games, and the host...fun, inviting, and unchanging for over 30 years...for my entire life.

About an hour after the show was over, I got a call. A 90-plus-year-old parishioner was in the hospital. I went to visit and ended up spending most of the afternoon with her as she was moved from room to room awaiting her diagnosis. When we finally "landed," she made a comment: "Don't ever, ever grow old. Everything changes all around you...and all you can remember is what was. And there are times when all you can manage to do is just miss things that have gone away."

I've been preaching a lot about change over the past few weeks...trying to bring home to the congregation that change is both exciting and terrifying, but that God is always in the middle of it, working to stretch us into new, more Christ-like people. Change and new life go hand-in-hand. What I am realizing is that I think I have it better than most. My parents still live in the house I grew up in. My hometown hasn't become a ghost town or a suburb. My friends and the majority of my family are still healthy and in touch. But there are still those times that it slaps this naive small-town boy in the face...that things change, even the things I love.

And so God told me something on Friday through, of all people, Bob Barker: As the things around us change, we cling to those things that somehow have held on...and then we mourn them all the more when they finally do give in.

The question is if we will look beyond what have lost to see what God is giving us here and now. And while that may be easy for a relatively young man like myself; the tally of what has been lost is much longer for many of us...and it becomes more and more challenging by the day to get beyond the mourning.

I woke up Saturday morning without a sermon. I leafed through those I wrote in seminary and decided to recycle one on Caleb and Joshua reassuring the Israelites that even though it seems impossible, God will take care of them as they enter the Promised Land. And I realized that it was a sermon that I need to hear, too:

That even though I'm getting older, even though I miss so much, even though the world is constantly changing...

The promises do not.