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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