Most of you here at St. John’s don’t
know me very well. My name is Rich Simpson and I serve on Bishop Doug Fisher’s
staff. Among other things, one of the primary parts of my portfolio is to work
with congregations that are moving through clergy transitions. Right now we
have fourteen of our congregations at various stages in that process across
the diocese.
Why so many? There is a long answer
and a short answer to that question. But the short one is that Episcopal clergy are old. A lot of
boomers, like Cat Munz, are retiring. So we are experiencing a generational
shift across the diocese and the wider church which is both exciting and challenging.
But more about that in due time. I’ll have more to say about the process that lies ahead today
at your Annual Meeting, so I encourage you to stay.
For now I’ll just add that
we are still in the midst of this season after Epiphany. Remember those wise
guys, coming to the Christ child by following the star, and bearing gifts, and
then going home by another way? This season of light reminds us that we are
called as well to follow the star, to find the Christ, to share our gifts, and
to be savvy in politically challenging times. That work continues regardless of
who the rector is. Remember in this time as you wonder and wander what it means to be the Church, and we'll find you a new rector to help that work along. I want to bear witness to you from my experience as a former
campus minister, as a parish priest, and now as someone doing diocesan ministry
and working with congregations from Williamstown to Northborough as they have
called new rectors over these past five years: transitions are opportunities to
learn and to grow. They are not seasons for “holding patterns” or for falling
back, by God’s grace. This is a time to get even clearer about God’s mission
and your role in helping to make it happen in this town. People navigate
transitions at different speeds. Some people love change. Other people resist
change. Most of us are somewhere in the middle and even, at any given moment,
of two minds.
But
here is the thing: to be alive is to be changing. To be alive is always to be in transition of one kind or
another, and the only things that don’t change are inanimate or dead. I always
tell congregations this at the beginning and hope a few people remember at the
end of the process: this process of your clergy transition will continue until
the “new rector” becomes just “the rector,” and that will take a while. After
this interim period with Julianne and then the call of the next rector, and a
moving van that brings him or her and possibly family members to your rectory,
it will still take a while longer to realize all the ways that that new person
is not Cat Munz. And it will take a while for that person to be able to serve
and lead with their own voice. So the more faithfully that this parish can
navigate this interim time, the more fruitful it will be. And I pray for just
that. With God’s help.
Now let us turn to this call
narrative from the scroll of the prophet Jeremiah and let’s see if it has a
word for this congregation on this Fourth Sunday of Epiphany. It is very clear
in the first three verses that God is addressing a particular person in a
particular time and in a particular place.
…and so the Word of Yahweh comes to
Jeremiah, the son of Hilkiah. Jeremiah is a “PK” (a priest’s kid) in Anathoth,
in the days of King Josiah, son of Amon of Judah. In the thirteenth year of his
reign.
This is a standard Biblical call
narrative. The pattern is the same one as for Moses and Isaiah, for Hannah and for
Mary. It’s the same for pretty much every person who comes to the Commission on
Ministry and says “I feel called to ministry” to this very day. It begins with
divine initiative, which is met with human resistance. So God says to Jeremiah:
“before you were even born I knew you,
and I appointed you to be a prophet to the nations.” To which Jeremiah
replies: “But I’m only a boy and I’m
afraid of public speaking and surely there must be somebody else...”
That’s the pattern. God calls and
God’s people almost always say, “no thank you. Surely there must be someone more
qualified.” But God, nevertheless,
persists. God responds with rebuke
and reassurance: rebuke (“don’t say you’re just a kid!”) and reassurance
(“don’t be afraid, I’ll be with you!) And then God puts out God’s hand and
touches Jeremiah’s mouth and commissions him to do the work God has given him
to do in his time and place.
Jeremiah is commissioned to do something: to share with God in God’s
work in the world, in his world six centuries before Messiah is born, among
real people with real questions and real hurts and real dreams. Vocation is
about a call to do something in a particular place at a particular time.
What is that work to which Jeremiah is called? Walter Brueggemann says that
Jeremiah is “reflective of and responsive to the historical crisis of the last
days of Judah , culminating
in the destruction of Jerusalem
Jeremiah
is commissioned to help God’s people deal with tremendous loss and then enter
into the Babylonian exile. The old order will be dismantled and a crisis of
faith will follow.
It isn’t pretty. It is also not the last word. The thing is, it will
take decades before another prophet (Second Isaiah) comes along to speak a word
of comfort, a word about new possibilities and a highway through the desert and
homecoming. The words that Jeremiah must
speak are far less comfortable words. His mission statement is found in
that tenth verse of the first chapter and it’s just six verbs that come up
again and again and again in the rest of the scroll, 51 more chapters. Jeremiah
is commissioned “to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow,
to build and to plant.”
It’s the best kind of mission
statement because it is short and to the point and oriented toward action. But
what I want you to notice is that 67% of Jeremiah’s time will be spent on
deconstructing the old order. It seems that has to happen before anything new
can happen. And even then, maybe the best Jeremiah will be able to do is to
plant some seeds and build a little on the foundation. Like us, he’s going to
have to take the long view. He won’t get to see homecoming, in a way similar to
Moses who doesn’t get to enter the Promised Land.
Jeremiah
is given the hard task of helping people deal with loss and grief as the
Babylonian army comes marching into Jerusalem and the temple comes crashing
down. They will be distraught. And they
will be angry at God and at those who claim to work for God. They will feel
betrayed. They will be bitterly divided. And they will feel like they have no
future. Is this sounding like some vestry meetings? Are you all in?
Barbara Brown Taylor put it this way
in “Leaving Church.”
The
way many of us are doing church is broken and we know it, even if we do not
know what to do about it. We proclaim the priesthood of all believers while we
continue living with hierarchical clergy, liturgy, and architecture. We follow
a Lord who challenged the religious and political institutions of his time
while we fund and defend our own. We speak and sing of divine transformation
while we do everything in our power to maintain our equilibrium. If redeeming
things continue to happen to us in spite of these deep contradictions in our
life together, then I think that is because God is faithful even when we are
not.
My friends: God is faithful, even when we are not. Hold onto that and let it be
your guiding star in the journey that wise women and wise men are called to in
this time and place. Let it be your guiding star in this season of transition
that lies ahead.
The work that you are called to is
not in the thirteenth year of the reign of King Josiah, but in the third year
of the reign of President Donald. The Episcopal Church in 2019 is not exactly
the same as the Jewish people in Babylonian captivity. Most of our “temples”
are still intact. Unfortunately we have lots of buildings that worked for our
mission in the nineteenth century that are less helpful in the twenty-first. To
your credit, you have been working on this building and that is a good thing.
So we need some imagination to make the connections from then to now. But it
doesn’t take much to say this much: after the annual meeting today, the work
that lies ahead will be challenging. And it ain’t all planting and building.
What
would Church look like if we lived as if we were truly prepared to lose our
lives in order to find them? Even to lose the Church in order to find it
again? We are tempted to think that our job as Christian leaders is to somehow
keep on trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. I know because
sometimes I spend a lot of time in my job trying to do just that. On the whole,
bishops and priests and deacons and laity spend enormous energy trying to hold
it all together. I heard a senior warden recently tell his congregation not to
worry, after the rector had just retired and an interim was on her way – that
nothing was going to change. I respectfully told him that I knew what he was
trying to say but that in fact, everything
was about to change. Everything except the foundation, which is Jesus Christ.
The sound of the priest’s voice when they celebrate the Eucharist, the way they
preach, their presence at a bedside with a dying parishioner: all of this
changes when a priest leaves. It’s not bad but we waste an enormous amount of energy
trying to keep things from being different. They will be different; embrace that. The goal is to lean in, I think,
to the new thing God is doing. And just as you’ve seen with your building
project, this requires not only new construction but first some deconstruction.
What if 2/3 of your job as a
congregation (especially during the interim time that lies ahead) will be about
deconstructing – that is to say, about letting go of some old stuff – in order
to then do some planting and building? Think of all those times Jesus talks
about pruning in the New Testament. Or about new wine and old wineskins.
Because those old ways, those old patterns, those old structures can keep us
from seeing and hearing the new thing God is doing.
God
is faithful. Even when we are not. Keep
responding to the living God who calls us each by name. Keep putting your trust
there, knowing that with God’s help we can do infinitely more than we can ask
or imagine. And with God’s help, hear those words of St. Paul to be patient and
kind and gentle with one another – not arrogant or rude. Let faith, hope, and
love abide – but especially love. Things will not stay the same at St. John’s. But
as things change, one constant remains: God is God. Christ is risen. The Holy
Spirit prods, and guides, and empowers. This one, holy, undivided God invites
us to follow the star into the world, to the Christ. May this be a time of
renewed commitment and faith as you find your way again to the One who is the
Way, and the Truth, and the Life.
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