The Loss Before the Life 4/7/19 Lent 5C

Rev. Dr. Rebecca L. Kiser

The Loss Before the Life

4/7/19       Lent 5C

            This may seem like this is a better sermon title for closer to Holy Week, a week from now.  However, this is my chance, because next week we will remember how Jesus was greeted that last time he came to Jerusalem, riding on a prancing white charger and surrounded by soldiers - wait a minute, that's what kings and Caesars did  - Jesus rode a poor little donkey and people threw down their coats and called him a king.... And our choir, augmented with some guest musicians, will move us from that glory to the events later in Holy Week.  To get the full drama of the end of Lent and Holy Week, may I remind you all of the Maundy Thursday service that we are hosting in our Fellowship Hall, a somber service that precedes the great mystery and triumph of Easter.

Lent and Holy Week confront us with one of the obvious truths of our faith, as well as among the most difficult to understand truths of our faith -- that before the glorious resurrection and victory of God that we all desire and anticipate with joy, there has to come a death.  Duh!  There has to be a death before there's a resurrection!  The texts for this week in Lent carry reminders of this: Isaiah tells us to not consider the things of the past, because God will do a new thing. We have to let go, say goodbye to the past in order to embrace the new thing God is doing.   In Philippians, the apostle writes that he regards all his former glories as garbage, compared to the delight of know Jesus Christ.  He forgets what lies behind as he presses towards the goal of life in God.  The Psalm text for today speaks of those who go out weeping even as they carry their seeds for planting, but return in joy with full sheaves of grain.  And the gospel text tells how Mary of Bethany, sister of Martha, uses funeral oils to anoint the feet of Jesus, speaking of his coming death.  They are sober texts.

I was in a church once where the choir leader's programs  never included a meditative piece,  a slow piece or a minor key.  I joked that his concerts were big, bigger and biggest - starting from the first song, it got louder and fancier until a crashing finale.  Sometimes the Christian faith is presented like that - joy, bigger joy and biggest joy. Yet the profound understanding of Christian faith, the understanding that is so important that its is built into the very nature of creation, is that there has to be loss, death, or descent into darkness, before the miracle of a new creation, a new life, a resurrected life, comes about.  Christianity does not overlook the pain and loss of living; in fact, that very pain and loss, that painful realization of confusion and chaos, is a necessary precursor to the new things that God is doing.

            I have to say that loss and death and the descent into confusion are not my favorite parts of living. Pruning, cutting back, letting go - these are not easy things to do or endure.  In fact, God usually has to force them on me, because I sure don’t choose them.  I’d rather just keep adding happy things, and not have any pain.  So would we all.  Its easy to say “God is certainly with us!” when good things happen. Its not so easy to remember to say “God is certainly with us!” when money is getting tighter, work is tenuous, friends move away, and family is separated by death or by miles. 

            Its not so easy to say “God is surely with us!” in our church life when numbers are dropping, giving is down, attendance is not like it was 20 years ago, ages are rising, and the outlook is discouraging.  Its not a wonderful moment in life when we hear a verdict from the doctors that brings our mortality into view. During those long years between birth and death, we can ignore the fact that humans are created beings with a start date and an end date, and none of us get out of here alive.  Certain milestones and events remind us and may make us anxious. I had a rough time anticipating turning 65 and having to sign up for Medicare, for example.  It was a hard birthday. 

Everything created, however, has its life cycle - Nations rise and fall.  Leaders have a heyday and then pass.  Discoveries are made and then surpassed, and sometimes even proved wrong.  Records set in the Olympics become targets to break in the next generation.  Smart ball players know they have but a few years of their top earning power: as they gain in wisdom about the game, they lose in physical prowess. Even the long-lived redwood trees eventually die, just as surely as the spring daffodils.  The Bible puts it that the grass rises up in the morning and is cut down - and all flesh is as grass. 

In the great salvation story of Christianity, Jesus comes to inaugurate the Kindom of God, which he proclaims loudly and clearly, where the standards of heaven are brought to confront the standards of earth.  And earth’s people rise up to kill him and his vision of the kindom - the realm of Christ is too different, too far from how we play the game.  Jesus must die.  And yet,... yet,... at the same time, in a creative move by God,  this death becomes the very doorway for God to recreate life, to show the power of new life, and call folks like us to be born anew, born into this realm of new life, and live out the realm of God while we’re still alive here.  Life wins.  Love wins. 

But death and loss are the pathway. 

We see this in our own lives - we have to say goodbye to our former house when we move to the new one.  We have to grieve a pastor leaving before we welcome the new pastor.  Our children graduate and leave home to make their own places - yet an adult relationship with them comes next.  As we grow up, we put away the cute stuffed animals and Barbie dolls, and replaced them with teenage and adult interests.  When my own children were dealing with the complexities of relationships and love, I told them to be sure they let go of the old love before taking up with the new love.  Good closures make for clean new beginnings.  The trapeze we’re swinging on has to be let go as we reach for the next trapeze.  Again, the apostle Paul talked about how a seed has to fall into the ground and die so that the power of new life can be unleashed in new growth.  Remember the seed in the little paper cup….  Seeds have to swell, warm and split, - no more seed - it explodes itself into the roots and stems and potential plant. 

We see it in our universe - stars burn bright for billions of years until their material is gone, and gravity pulls the matter inward as a dark star, which explodes and throws the elements and atoms and molecules of life out into the space to take new forms as planets and eventually plant and animal life. 

Women’s and men’s lives go through stages of change, too. We women lose our independent maiden status when we marry and become mothers - and when our ability to be mothers passes, we become wise women - the old generations called us crones.  Maiden, mother and crone.  Although I looked forward with anticipation to marriage and family, I also grieved the loss of the time when I could do what I wanted without really thinking of someone else and setting myself aside for the needs of children. When they left home it was another loss of the identity that motivated me for 20+ years, until I found again who I was as an older single again. Daniel Levinson, is his book Seasons of a Man’s Life, explores the changes for men as decades pass. 

The daily devotions I receive from F. Richard Rohr have been, this week, about how death can be a master teacher for us, to let go of the lesser things and find our center in the larger reality of God.  To be present to today, the good as well as the difficult, to not dwell on past events, to let go of attachments that hold us back, as Paul writes about laying aside the unneeded in this Christian race.  Use the reality of death, he suggests, to ask ourselves, “How should we then live?”

There is gain in these ponderings, both for us as individuals, and also for us as a church.  Indiantown Pres is at a turning point, and it seems to me we all know it, as different ones of you have discussed it with me. The knowledge of this tipping point is underneath the decision to call a new pastor, even though it means dipping into the savings of our forebears - we realize that the rainy day they saved for is here.  We need to do something to move into our future. 

Its difficult to think about, isn’t it?  Its hard to admit it, and face it.  Its easier to remember the past years of full parking lot and full pews and large Sunday Church School. We grieve the passing of those years, when living in this agricultural region was different, too. Change has happened, and wishing it hadn’t is not a viable strategy.  And talking wishfully about those days coming back somehow is a pipe dream. 

So what do we do? 

As your Interim Pastor, or as we are being called now, Transitional Pastors, part of my job is to assist this congregation to assess the current realities, and decide how to move forward.  To be open to changes, doing things differently, because the setting here has changed.  No, we’re not throwing out Jesus and church; no, we’re not trashing traditions with random changes.  Our task is to look again at what living the faith calls from us, to look again at what it means to be the church of Jesus Christ, to reconsider what our mission is from God in large terms and then in more local terms.  Its not so much an ending as it is the cusp of a new thing God wants to do.  God is always creating new life, and we have the opportunity to join in that creativity and help get where the Holy Spirit wants to go.

How we are the church is not written in stone. Early gatherings met in houses and in caves.  They gathered around meals, they cared for the needy among themselves.  They sent money to other gatherings that were having trouble.  They supported the mission outreach of Paul and others.  Through the decades of church, there have been small chapels, meetings under trees, and glorious cathedrals.  Sometimes people have gathered to live together in cloisters and shared gifts with the local towns. Pastors have been married and unmarried.  Churches have been integral to communities and out on the outskirts of communities.  Because the followers of Christ have sought ways to live into their calling despite the changes of time and culture.  And we will do it again and again until Christ returns on earth.  The truths of our faith are too compelling to be set aside and forgotten.  And our God is a creative and life-giving God who is always present and always working. 

Indiantown Pres is not yet on its last legs.  We have resources and we have people, and we have a connection to other churches in our region through our Presbytery.  What we need is to seek a vision and a mission for what God is calling us to do in the future - a new vision, laying aside what is past, and pushing for our leg of this relay race of the church.  What we need is to let go of how things were done in the past, and be open to how to fulfill our calling now.  God, as Isaiah reminded the people, made a way in the desert; God made a way  in the sea; God made a way in the wilderness and made rivers in the desert to give us to drink.  God continues to make a way today.  AMEN.