| Rector’s
Sermon
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| These past four Sundays have had a disturbing theme running through our readings. It has to do with the requirements necessary for salvation. In other words who is to be included in the Kingdom of Heaven and how do we get there. That theme has had a varied form. Four weeks ago, it was about our hands being cut off and our eyes being plucked out rather than facing the fires of hell intact. Three weeks ago Jesus said that unless we grownups become like children we won’t make it. Last Sunday if you were the rich young man and weren’t willing to sell everything you had and give it to the poor and follow Jesus, you weren’t getting in. And today we have James and John jockeying for positions of honor, assuming it’s a done deal. In fact, Jesus talks more about the Kingdom of Heaven than he does anything else, with money, surprisingly, a close second. I will get to money in a minute or two, but for now, heaven provides a daunting prospect at least in these vignettes of Jesus’ thinking on the subject. To be honest I have been conscious of heaven more recently not because I think there is anything imminent for me to be concerned about, but because part of what I do as Rector and part of our life together as a congregation has often to do with dying and death. Jeanne Stewart bore the brunt of it last summer with nine burials that included six memorial services including those of Ken Gould and Bill Howell and Lucy Peterson, strong, committed members of this church, lovely people I trusted and admired. We are diminished by our loss. It’s not unusual for any parish to focus on the deaths of its members, but at Christ Church, it seems that this is a particularly constant ministry because of the beauty and long standing access of our churchyard. But then all of us, quite apart from our church association, have from time to time to be confronted with the dying and death of people close to us, of friends, colleagues, schoolmates. My wife Bev has had two of her oldest and dearest childhood friends die of cancer in the short time since we’ve been back from our vacation. In each instance she’s been moved by the courage and poignancy of their struggle and the witness of their families and friends, two lives that were vibrant and giving under very challenging circumstances. You know people like Bev’s friends. You know what that heartache is and even the injustice of it all to quote Rabbi Kushner, “When bad things happen to good people.” Listen to this poem that played a part in both of the remembrances for Bev’s friends. It has to do with the inevitability of death and how we are able to have glimpses of god’s kingdom in that stark reality. It’s titled In Black Water Woods by Mary Oliver.
“To love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go.” There is such mystery surrounding death but also in a strange way such beauty if we can let it go into the hands of God. When Jesus talked about the Kingdom of Heaven, when he talked about how it is we serve one another as inheritors of the Kingdom of God, there is paradox in the finding of something while at the same time giving it up. People who want to control or even manipulate their own, and others’, destinies will find fulfillment to be very elusive. That life-saving paradox can be described in Jesus’ insistence that only when you’re willing to give your life away can you truly find it. And also when he said, “The first shall be last and the last shall be first” and when he referred to anticipating the giving up of his own life in order to save ours. I said earlier that Jesus had a few things to say about money and truth be known it’s the Vestry’s expectation that that’s what I would be talking about today as well. Next Sunday is “Consecration Sunday” when we present our pledges at the altar and so money is very much on my mind and that of the Vestry as we think about the uncertainty of the economy at large, as we think about budgets here and the price of fuel oil and insurance and the like. But bear with for me just a minute as I connect these two trains of thought from a purely personal perspective. I need this church. I don’t need it just because I’m the Rector and I have a job, a job I actually like. Those things help, but I need it for a different reason. I need you for a different reason. When I suffer a loss in my life where else do I go to be assured that all is well? Where else do I go to hear that the people I love are safe? Where else do I go so that I can be nourished for the journey that all of us must take “through the valley of the shadow of death?” What value do I place on my being a part of the only community that starts me on my Christian journey, that feeds me for that journey, and that carries me when I’m no longer able to walk by myself? This church proclaims that I can have a life blessed by God in relationship with Jesus who came to teach me what life with God can really be. Quite frankly, I cannot imagine not having that assurance, bereft of a community of caring, no glimpses toward that which Christ’s life points with the spirit underneath me and above me and behind me and before me. I know, perhaps even better than anyone else, that this church has fuel bills and salaries to pay and wonderful programs to support. But it’s also a living, breathing community of faith I can find nowhere else, and my life, almost literally, depends on it being here. My life, almost literally, depends on you being here. Thank God for your being here, and thank God for your being here for one another. And thank God for the life-giving gift of Jesus who is also here and will always be here whether I deserve it or not. |
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