MUMC Sermon-07/02/06

The Tuesday phone call came from my younger son, Nathan, now living in San Francisco. He moved there a year ago, and I suppose that whenever I talk to him, I realize at an unconscious level just how far it is to the other side of this country and this continent. So hearing his voice on Tuesday morning, even as the four guys from “Divine Moving” packed our things for the move, brought me to my first feelings of loss. “I just called to wish you well, dad,” he said. Then, “I hope the move goes well, and not too much gets broken.”

When he said that, something let loose in my heart. I realized that, of course, much would be broken. Strange that, I had not felt it until then, this sense of loss in the process of change. Of course. There was bound to be breakage, and I should let myself feel the loss. It didn’t take long for the reality of loss to occur. Unpacking on Wednesday, at the bottom of a box marked “fragile,” Lynne found the broken pieces of a favorite little lamp.

The truth is, of course, that things get broken in a move. A retired Army Colonel, a veteran of both Viet Nam, an assignment at the Pentagon, and countless reassignments, once told me, “Four moves equals one fire.” Loss is part of the journey of life. And since all life is about change, in every change, throughout life, inevitably things will be broken.

In thinking and praying about the process of this pastoral change over the past few weeks, I realize that we, you and I, each have our own losses in this process. Hope and anxiety often go hand in hand in our lives. Early in my ministry I overheard a wise layman in a church tell a young pastor, “Well, you’ll please everyone in this church.” The pastor was flattered until he went on, “You’ll please them all, eventually. You’ll please some of them by arriving; and you’ll please others by leaving.” I suppose that’s true of every pastor, and it will be true of me as well. Of course, part of us pastors is pleased both to arrive and to depart. Who would imagine it otherwise?

But today, I am excited about our future together. I know that there are challenges, but that’s true of any church and any life. I see myself primarily as a pastor. Sometimes I am a prophet, speaking a confronting word; and sometimes I am an evangelist, because I find both missions and evangelism crucial to the life of faith and the life of the church. Primarily, though, I am a pastor. I look to share this common life of faith with you, bringing a heart of compassion to my leadership.

There is much that God will call us to do and to be in our coming days, months, and years together. Together, we will BE the church. But we’ll do well not to enter into any kind of denial that life is about change, and change always means loss, and this means feeling the multiple feelings of grief that accompany any loss.

As a church, the most obvious loss is that of Javier’s leadership. You are fortunate that Jennifer Morrow and others have named this reality for you already. I’m grateful to be working with Jennifer, and grateful that she has stood here in this pulpit and named the realities of loss and grief. Javier’s departure was a significant change, not to be brushed easily aside. That we have ultimately essentially exchanged jobs is, for all of us involved, a bit strange. Not inappropriate, but strange.

But there are other changes, both in our church’s past and certainly in its future. I know that not because I have an agenda for a particular change, but because I know that all life, even the life of the church, is about change. I know it also because, long before I knew I might ever be your pastor, I listened to my friend Bill Shillady talk about this church and his tenure here. I will long have a vision in my mind of him standing at the door while the bell crashed to the floor of the narthex. Bill led through a life that involved growth; that growth came as it always does, through a process of change that involved some loss.

Life is that way. Something comes to an end; and then, by God’s grace, something new, which was not possible before, begins. A child graduates from college and moves to begin a career. A spouse dies, and from the ashes of life’s broken hopes, new direction, a new relationship, and a new hope can be born. A job comes to an abrupt ending, but only then can a new career begin.

Observing our nation’s founding this week, we know that our country was born only when its relationship with England was severed. That severance was both painful and costly. And it, from our perspective of over 200 years of history, was necessary. Yet at the time, there were both patriot and loyalist who questioned in their own hearts how much this transition would cost, and who must have wondered, “Is it worth it?” At the time, the outcome uncertain, no one could have known, for sure. We are a nation because some were willing to suffer loss, even loss of life, that the dream of a new nation might be born.

Or, as in today’s lesson from the Hebrew Bible, a king dies in battle, opening the possibility for a new king to ascend. “After the death of Saul,” the lesson begins. Many of us bring a bit of knowledge to the passage: Saul is the first king of the nation, but David will become the greatest of Israel’s kings; David has already been anointed by the prophet Samuel as Saul’s successor; David and Saul’s relationship is bitter, antagonistic, hostile; the army of Judah is fighting the Philistines, and both Saul and Jonathan, Saul’s son and heir-apparent, are killed. This we know. And this also: Jonathan is David’s dearest friend, even though Jonathan remains devoted to his father.

So, “after the death of Saul,” we might expect David, both his ambitions and God’s anointed role for him are about to be joyful. The throne is his.

But before he ascends this throne, David descends into his grief, and the grief of the nation. He sings a song of lament, echoing three times, “How the mighty have fallen. How the mighty have fallen. How the mighty have fallen.”

The lesson is poignant and pointed. We feel David’s grief, the nation’s grief. And we are liberated from our denial. We, too, are allowed to feel it, the pain of change. In any move, in all life’s changes, something is bound to be broken. In the midst of the breakage, we mourn the loss.

For mourning the loss opens the heart to a new hope for a transformed future in God’s hands. For that is our hope, always: a future shaped not by our hands alone, but by the hands of God.

As we come to this table, we come as a broken people, each of us carrying some scar from life’s loss. We come, sustained by the love of Christ, who gave himself to suffer loss that we might live. His death was a real, painful loss. But in that death is the hope of resurrection - a new, transformed life. The bread we break is a sharing, we will say, in the body, in the loss, of Christ.

We, too, are called to loss for the sake of Christ. We, too, are called to let go of the old life that the new life may be born in us and in the world. We, too, are called to let our lives be broken, that we may live into the newness that God has in store for us.

A bit of breakage is inevitable in life. When we are broken, we believe, we are in God’s hands. We are not alone. This is the faith that guides and sustains us on the journey.

Such is the life of faith that I am delighted to begin sharing with you this day. I look forward to our journey together. Amen.