Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Long time abiding



It is hard to say what meaning, if any, we should take from the fact that when people gathered 160 years ago today in the parlors Washington Hotel in Petaluma to organize an Episcopal church they chose the name “St. John’s.”  Maybe some of them brought with them fond memories of another St. John’s Church in another town they’d left behind.  Maybe they just liked the name, because it had a robust, churchly ring to it.  But maybe there was more to it than that.  Maybe our founding fathers and mothers had a particular love for the books of the New Testament named for John.  Maybe they found in those writings a spirit and a truth that they hoped would inhabit the new community they were forming.
We can’t say for sure.  We do know that by the 20th Century, people here came to think enough of St. John to commission the four windows, two on each side of the nave, that illustrate different traditions associated with his name.  I love those windows, each of which is an extraordinary little image in its own right, but I have a particularly close relationship with that one over there—“St. John writing his Epistle.”  Every Sunday and Wednesday, and sometimes on other days at weddings and funerals, I sit right here listening to the reading of the scriptures, preparing myself to preach, and I look at St. John, gazing at the cross in the window, just as I am gazing at him, trying to capture with pen and paper something of the mystery of Christ’s love.
Now, from a historical point of view those windows are a bit of an embarrassment.  Modern critical scholars have long questioned whether the John who lies over there on the Isle of Patmos dreaming of the New Jerusalem could possibly be the same person who wrote the fourth Gospel, or the three New Testament letters of John.  And while the Gospel claims to be the testimony of the “Disciple whom Jesus loved,” it leaves his or her identity notably obscure, and there is nothing in the text itself to definitively link it, as later tradition did, to John, the brother of James, one of the twelve apostles.    The most that academics are willing to concede today is that there might have been a “school” of Christian teaching, if you will, and a community committed to handing it down, that traced its origins back to that John.  
But even this is subject to debate.  Alternate candidates for the Beloved Disciple abound nowadays, including Lazarus of Bethany and Mary Magdalene.  And I have to admit, it’s not a question I’ve given much thought or study.  Because for me, knowing the “real source” of the tradition of the Gospel of John, is less important than the general point that today’s reading from that Gospel makes.  Which is that the church has never been a monolith.  There have always different communities with different ways of bearing witness to Christ, and these differences go all the way back to the differences between Jesus’ disciples.  Because they had different personalities and experiences, and qualitatively different relationships with their master.  
The community that produced the Gospel of John was well aware that they possessed stories and sayings of Jesus that were markedly different from those of other Christian groups.  But they preserved them, tenaciously, as a precious inheritance from the mind and heart of the disciple whom Jesus loved.  The Gospel today cites a tradition that Jesus himself had said that this disciple would remain until he came.  But it also points out very clearly that it would be a misinterpretation to take that saying literally, as if it meant that the community’s founder did not and will not die.  Because it is the community that ensures that the witness of the beloved disciple will not pass away.  That testimony, that revelation of eternal life, gives the community its unique vocation to the church and to the world, and they will remain steadfast in declaring it, until it is finally fulfilled. 
This word “remain” or sometimes “abide,” is a particular favorite of the author of the Gospel and the letters of John.  And it’s a word with particular resonance for a congregation celebrating its 160th year.  Somehow St. John’s, Petaluma has managed to remain through a Civil War and two World Wars, through earthquakes, floods, and fires, and numerous economic depressions, through social struggles over abolition, and temperance, and women’s suffrage, and the rights of labor and civil rights, and even internal theological divisions that have resulted, at least twice, in schism.  And those historic events surely had an impact on the people of St. John’s.  But I have to tell you, as I’ve spent quite a lot of time in the past couple of months, poring over our parish archives, I have noted that these events scarcely earn a mention in the records of this church.  It’s as if there’s been some other history going on here all this time, some other life being lived, that pays little mind to the headlines in the newspaper—no matter what happens in the wider world, it simply abides.
Which brings me back to our gospel lesson this morning and its story of two disciples, walking with the risen Jesus after breakfast on the beach.  The first one, Peter, has a dramatic, emotional conversation with the Lord, in which he professes his love for him three times, and three times is told “feed my sheep.”  And Jesus calls Peter all over again to follow him, as a pastoral and missionary leader of the church, and in the end to take the way of the cross and die a martyr’s death in Rome.   But before he sets out, Peter turns and sees the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and he asks, “Lord, what about him?”  And Jesus tells Peter, not that it’s any of his business, that he has something else in mind for that one, something less exciting or seemingly important, which is that he should simply remain.
In a world that is all about making an impact, and achieving results, it’s not that easy to explain to outsiders what exactly we’ve been doing here at St. John’s, Petaluma for the last hundred and sixty years.  No doubt our members have made significant contributions to the general welfare and quality of life in the town over that time.  Many of them surely played at least a small part in the great events that have shaped the world.  But there’s not really anything we can point to, outside of our little church on the corner, and say with pride “that was us—we did that.”  There aren’t any great saints or famous people whose names we can drop in casual conversation and say “by the way, she was one of ours.”  But this doesn’t necessarily mean we have not been faithful to our calling as a parish.  Maybe we were never called on a heroic missionary quest; maybe we were never called to be in the vanguard of the revolution.  Maybe, like the beloved disciple, we were called simply to remain, to abide.
“To abide” doesn’t only mean to persist or endure—it can also mean “to dwell,” “to rest” or “to inhabit.”  And while it may be that Christ is a truth to grasp, or a cause to embrace, or a victory to win, in the Gospel and the Letters of John, Christ is also a love to abide in.  He is a vine in whom we abide, and if we do abide in him we bear much fruit, but if we don’t we can do nothing.  He is a word of life that abides in us when he eat his flesh and drink his blood.  And so for 160 years, the people of St. John’s, Petaluma have made this our main purpose, and the focus of our common life—in good times and bad, in season and out of season, abiding in Christ, and praying him to abide in us.  And if from time to time we have lost our way, and gotten caught up in things of secondary importance, we have so far always managed somehow to find our way back to the center, to the word of life, to the place we are called to remain. 


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About Me

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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.