GUILDERLAND — When Pastor Kyle Delhagen writes his sermon every week, he has a prayer on his lips: Lord, your words, not mine.
“I’m in love with words,” Delhagen says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

He was installed in late October as the pastor at Hamilton Union Presbyterian Church, established in Guilderland in 1824.

Delhagen wrote poetry as a student of poet Jack Ridl at Hope College in Michigan. Ridl’s writing courses are among the things Delhagen has, years later, found most useful in his ministry. “I look at my sermons and my sermon writing through a creative lens,” says Delhagen.

“I really love the entire art form of a sermon from sitting down with a text, wrestling with it, looking at what other people have said, and then trying to pull something out that is hopefully relevant and new and inspiring.”

Looking through the lens of poetry, he finds the process both invigorating and fun. Poetry reaches people in a way that no other art form can, says Delhagen.

He lets his thoughts for the sermon simmer all week long, even as he pumps gas or picks up his son from school.

Often, he reads what others have written about a particular biblical passage and he sometimes goes back to the original Hebrew or Greek.

Although Delhagen writes his sermons in manuscript form, he says, “A sermon has to be preached.”

There have been many times, he says, when he is standing in the pulpit, sharing a word and, he says, “I feel that liminal space open up, that space between heaven and Earth just becomes razor thin. And I feel that’s the spirit just liting, up on my shoulders and I’m like, ‘OK, I know that this is truth and this truth is good, and I hope that somebody’s listening.’”

Although Delhagen grew up in a pastor’s family, he wasn’t sure he wanted to be pastor or raise his own family that way. “I fought against going into the ministry for a long time,” he said.

He likened living in a minister’s family to living in a fishbowl, with people always watching. And, then there were the many moves he made as his father changed locations.

At the same time, though, Delhagen said he learned about many different kinds of people and cultures from all the moves and he felt like he had a lot of “moms and dads and aunts and uncles and grandmas and grandpas” looking out for him.

“I learned that … just because I look the way I do doesn’t mean that mine is the only perspective,” he said.

When he went to seminary, he introduced himself, Delhagen recalled, by saying: “My grandfather was a minister. My father is a minister. I’m here because of a genetic disorder.”

Delhagen grew up in the Reformed Church in America. His mother’s father was also a Reformed pastor. Delhagen himself was ordained in the Reformed Church.

He likes the Presbyterian Church because it is “much, much bigger, much more expansive, much, much more tuned in to issues of justice that were passionate to my heart.”

While the Reformed Church in America is one of the oldest denominations in the country, founded in 1628, Delhagen notes it is very small. It has about 200,000 members compared to 1.7 million in the Presbyterian Church.

Delhagen loves lots of people in the Reformed Church, he said, but feels it is “tearing itself apart over issues of human sexuality.”

“And so I have found myself to be adopted into this denomination,” Delhagen said of Presbyterianism. “And I love it here.”

His congregation has taken up the Presbyteran Church’s Matthew 25 vision. In that chapter of the Bible, Delhagen explains, Jesus “talks about that day of judgment when God is going to separate out the people and put at his right hand those who did God’s will and, at his left hand, those who didn’t.

“And he says, ‘You know who fed me when I was hungry, you clothed me when I was naked, you visited me when I was sick and in prison.’ And the people say, ‘When did we do that, Jesus?’ and he says, ‘Whenever you did it to the least of these, you did it to me.’”

So churches that adopt the Matthew 25 vision seek to dismantle systemic racism and address structural poverty among other things. Hamilton Union this year focused on hunger, helping the Guilderland Food Pantry and the Regional Food Bank, Delhagen said.

Hamilton Union also raised $5,000 to fill a metaphorical ark, through Heifer International, with cows and chickens and goats to help people in undeveloped countries.

“I want to challenge my congregation and our community … to look at how issues of race and gender and economics intersect in creating systems of poverty,” said Delhagen.

He went on, “There’s a saying that, if a fish washes up on the shore, one might ask: What’s wrong with the fish? If a bunch of fish wash up on the shore you have to ask: What’s wrong with the water?”

With poverty, churches and society tend to focus on addressing individual needs, which is important but, he said, we also need to look at the larger picture and address the issues keeping people in poverty.

“In an age when the gap between wealthy and poor is continuing to widen to the size of a canyon, we really need to address those systems head-on and be willing to ask the hard questions,” he said.

Delhagen was attracted to the Guilderland church because he wanted his family to live in a diverse community.  He and his wife, Elena, have a 5-year-old son, Atticus — named for the lawyer seeking justice against all odds in “To Kill a Mockingbird” — and a 15-year-old daughter, Juma; her name is Arabic for Friday.

Juma was adopted from Liberia, where Elena spent five years as a missionary, working with orphans. Although the Delhagens feel it’s best “if a child can grow up in their home culture and home country,” he said, Juma had medical needs that wouldn’t be met in Liberia.

When the Delhagens adopted Juma three years ago, they lived in a “beautiful little town, but it is very small and it’s very white ...,” said Delhagen. “Juma didn’t see anybody who looked like her.”

He went on, “Elena and I want for our kids and for our family to be in a place where we see diversity. … There are so many different points of view and styles of living out there, and they’re all beautiful and they’re all worthy and they’re all important.”

Delhagen said, “One of the things that drew me to the ministry is that messy beautifulness …. In the Presbyterian tradition, we talk about trying to realize God’s kingdom on Earth.

“You know, God’s kingdom is not a someday, some way out there, somewhere up in the sky thing. God’s kingdom is present all around us right now here and we catch little glimpses of it. And I think we catch glimpses of it most prominently when we are in community together.”

Delhagen wears his ministerial collar when he visits shut-ins or hospital patients, seeing it as a mantle. “I have taken the mantle on myself,” he said. “That mantle of responsibility….”

The past two years, with the death and isolation brought on by the pandemic have been “the hardest two years any of us have ever experienced,” said Delhagen. “And I hope it has taught us to be a little kinder and a little softer with one another.”

The hardest and best year of his life, he said, was when he was a chaplain for Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia, in the roughest part of the city. “Einstein is a trauma-one center, which means the worst of the worst comes there — car accidents, medical emergencies, gunshots.”

He walked with and comforted people in the most dire circumstances: a mother whose son was killed by a gun, a family saying goodbye to a 90-year-old patriarch.

He has similar feelings about the period we are all living through now. “These two years, through COVID and through the racial reckoning that has been taking place in our nation, we have a long way to go. But we also need to recognize the humanity in one another …. It’s almost something you can’t teach with words or explain with words. You just have to live it and show it.”

— Melissa Hale-Spencer