Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Letting Jesus be free




This week I heard from one member of our congregation about how he said good-bye to his dying father.  The same day I heard from another one about an unexpected test result and an uncertain diagnosis and the sudden possibility of having to say good-bye.  Not good-bye in the sense of “have a good night, see you tomorrow,” but as in “thank you for being a part of my life, I will never forget you.”  Having these kinds of conversations reminds me just how commonplace and yet complex a business saying good-bye is. 
And the closer the relationship, the more love there is between us, the more complicated goodbye becomes.  The man whose father died this week told about the strangeness of being in his father’s house, the day after, expecting any minute to see him come shuffling out of his bedroom to take a seat in his favorite chair.  And that it wasn’t going to happen, that it couldn’t happen, was a truth less real than the space his father had in the heart of his son, a space that remained alive and full. 
The ancient calendar of the church year allows us forty days to say good-bye to Jesus.  Since Easter Day, readings from the Gospel of John have been guiding us through this process.    Some of them have been stories of encounters with Jesus after his death, when he showed himself to his disciples and ate with them and told them things they couldn’t understand before he died.  He showed them that the space that their love for him had created in their hearts was still alive and full.  There was even a body.  But it wasn’t a body that didn’t die—the marks of his wounds proved that.   And it wasn’t a body they could hold on to.  Jesus’ resurrection doesn’t mean we don’t have to let him go.
We have to let Jesus go just like we have to let each other go.  It is the price of loving him.  It is how we learn who he really is, and what he really means to do for us.  But it’s not easy to let him go, because we haven’t seen his risen body with our own eyes.  We haven’t touched him with our hands, and so we make the same mistake with Jesus that we make with one another.  We imagine that because he is not here anymore, we have lost him.  We fear that his going away is absolute, final separation.  This can make us cling to our image of him.  But this only hinders us from knowing him as really is now.
When I left my previous position at All Saints’, Carmel I said good-bye with great care.  I knew when I was leaving, and where I was going, for three weeks before I announced it to the congregation.  The vestry of St. John’s, Petaluma kept the secret from the people here for the same length of time, and the public announcement in happened simultaneously in both places, on the same Sunday morning.  You see, we wanted people to hear about it first from me.  We also wanted to time the process of leave-taking so it would be not-too-long and not-too-short. 
All of this was based on sound professional advice.  There are whole schools of thought in clergy circles about how leaving a congregation ought best to be done.  There are numerous books and articles on the subject, all of them cautioning the importance of careful planning and preparation.  Now, I don’t intend any disrespect to my profession, or to make the light of the insights of people with far more experience than I.  But I do have to wonder why someone would wait until the very end of a pastorate to start saying good-bye.  What kind of relationships would make departure such a crisis?  What had those people been taught to expect?  Where were they placing their ultimate trust? 
In the Gospel of John, on the night before his death, Jesus gives his disciples a long good-bye speech.  It is consistent with his teaching in the rest of the gospel; whenever people are getting hung up on the details of his personal biography, questioning his credentials as a religious teacher, and whether his words and his works can be trusted, Jesus points them away from himself in the direction of the one he calls “Father.”  “I only say what the Father has given me to say;”  “The Son can do only what he sees the Father doing;” “If you knew me, you would know my Father also;” and so on like that.    
And now Jesus tells his disciples not to let their hearts be troubled or afraid.  He is saying good-bye, but it is a good-bye full of hope.  Because in going away Jesus will not be simply extinguished.  He will not become nothing.  He is returning to the Father, to the creative source of life and love.  And he is not going back simply to melt away into the Father like a drop back back into the ocean.  He is going back as the only Son of the Father, but also as the Son of Man, to dwell as the human Jesus in the heart of the eternal God. 
The relationship that we have with Jesus as a human person, that Jesus-shaped space in our hearts, can become the place where we meet the eternal wellspring of life and love.  But his coming to dwell with us, to be the saving justice that sets the world right, to be the spirit of truth that fills our hearts with peace, and confidence, and love, requires that we first say good-bye.  He has his own ultimate purpose, his own loving relationship to the absolute mystery.  It was that relationship that gave him his will, his words, and his power.   We have to allow him to pass beyond our knowledge into that dazzling darkness if we want him to come back as the source of freedom and grace.

Today’s lesson from Acts gives us a picture of how that works.  First of all, Paul has a dream.  A man from Macedonia appears to him in a dream and says, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.”  And that is all the prompting Paul needs, and he and his assistants set sail across the Aegean Sea, to a place where they know no one.   Following a hunch, they go outside of the city of Philippi one Sabbath day, looking for a place where Jews might gather to pray.   They find a group of women and sit down and speak with them.  And then, the scripture says, the Lord opened the heart of one of them, just one, named Lydia, “to listen eagerly” to what they said, and she got baptized and invited them to be guests in her home. 
This story describes how the word of Jesus Christ makes its way in the world.  It moves here and there in a manner that is hard to account for, that at times seems almost random, and yet suggests a deep and powerful purpose.  And what moves it along is the human heart, the dreams that we follow, the things that we learn to desire, the wisdom that we hears and recognize as the compelling and liberating truth.  It is the same truth that moved in the heart Jesus himself, the truth of who God really is, and what kind of relationship God wants to have with us, and how that can take shape in the lives we lead and the way we relate to each other.
This story shows us human beings who are free.  Though they are moved from within, it is in response to a love and a purpose that comes to them from somewhere else.  They are like actors in a drama whose main character never simply walks out onto the stage, but whose place is continually shifting.  He can show up in whatever manner the moment calls for, and always in a way that invites a free human response.  That invitation extends to you and me.  You and I can live with Jesus in that relationship of trust and purpose and freedom.  We only have to love him and seek to know him, and to keep his word.  That, and to let him be free.

No comments:

Post a Comment

About Me

My photo
Petaluma, California, United States
I am a priest in the Episcopal Church, and have been (among other things) an organic farmer and gardener, and a Zen monk. I have a lifelong interest in social and spiritual renewal on the basis of contemplative discipline, creative nonviolence, and ecological practice. In recent years my work has focused intensely on the responsibility of pastoral ministry in the humanistic, evangelical, and catholic branch of Christianity known as Anglicanism. I'm married with a daughter, and have three brothers and two parents.