,On Thursday morning at about 11 o’clock my father and I got in my car and took off to drive to Crescent City, in the extreme north west corner of California, where my Dad’s brother, my Uncle J.D. , lives. It’s a journey of six or so hours of driving, and it was almost dark when we got there. After we checked into our motel, I called my uncle and then we headed out to his place on the outskirts of town. We turned off on the last road before the highway disappears into the redwoods on its way to Grant’s Pass, Oregon. As we approached the trailer park where he lives we spotted a figure standing in the darkness by the side of the road waiting for us--Uncle JD. He was wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat on top of a knit watch cap. He greeted us nonchalantly in his funny singsong voice, as if we were seeing each other for the third time that day, and not the first time in a year-and-a-half. As soon as we were all back in the car and driving to a restaurant he launched into long story about a rare snowstorm in Los Angeles and the friends he made a snowman with over sixty years ago.
It was pretty much like that throughout dinner and afterwards when we returned to his musty trailer and stood in his nearly-empty, grease-spattered kitchen looking at old pictures, and some new pictures of my family that I’d brought along, until it was time to say ‘goodnight’. And it was pretty much the same again at breakfast on Friday morning, after which we dropped him off at home and began the six hour drive back south again. It’s always a little sad, going to see my strange old uncle, witnessing his loneliness and poverty, listening to him tell his tragicomic stories about people and places that are long-gone, and probably weren’t all that interesting to begin with. It is a many-layered sadness, infused with all the loss and tragedy and “dysfunction” of my father’s family. For a long time I held that sadness at a distance and treated it as if weren’t mine. But in recent years that’s changed. Maybe it’s because I’m aware that my time with my father is short, maybe because I’m a father myself now; maybe it’s because I’m more accepting of myself and who I really am, as opposed to the false person I pretend to be, but I have come to value Uncle JD, and his place in my life.
The verses of today’s gospel accompanied me on my journey to Crescent City and back this week and with them the mysterious grace and mercy of God. When Our Lord saw the great crowd that had come to him from all over the region, a crowd that had brought with them the sick and those in pain, the demon-haunted and paralyzed, he climbed the mountain and sat down to teach his disciples. He opened his mouth and the words that came forth were words of blessing, God’s blessing. His teaching was of the kingdom of heaven, of where God is taking the world and how we ought to go along. What he said is heartbreaking and at the same time it is the best news we could ever hope to receive: there is really nothing we can “do”. The things that Jesus says are blessed are not actions we can take. They are not practical steps or even positive attitudes. They are qualities of the soul, and they are the kinds that ripen in suffering.
In marked contrast to the strenuous effort and individual achievement that we usually think of as the keys to happiness, Jesus says that the blessed are those who accept that they have very little to bargain with when it comes to God. They are the ones who are willing to embrace the heartbreak of the world as it is. They see injustice and misery but they don’t try to force people to be better, but meet them with gentleness and mercy. To be truly happy, says Jesus, is to trust less in your own power to make things work out the way you want them to, and more in God’s power to open your heart. His wisdom is that there is a deeper and richer joy to be found than the satisfaction of our desires. It comes from what God does, loving and caring for the world in its brokenness.
This is the kind of wisdom that strikes many people as foolishness. There aren’t many places, maybe not even many churches, where this radical wisdom is followed. When I told an old friend about the challenge that I had accepted in coming here to St. John’s, and the need we have to add new members, she said my concern with numerical growth made me sound like every hedge fund manager and corporate CEO in America. I said some words in my defense that I thought made sense at the time, but she was pointing out a real danger. It is easy for us to get into thinking about our work as the church, or even our life as Christians, in ways that use Jesus to achieve our idea of success, rather than using ourselves to enter into Jesus’ mercy.
Today is our annual parish meeting, and at this meeting we will celebrate many genuine accomplishments of the past year and recognize some of the people who worked the hardest to bring them about. And this is as it should be. I don’t believe in putting on false humility, or robbing ourselves of the satisfaction of knowing a job has been well done. But we do need to remember that it is God who gave us the wit and the strength, the patience and the endurance to do these things.
And we may also talk a little today about our future, and our mission as a parish. You may have noticed that I like to talk about these things. I think it is important for all of us to recognize that we have been blessed with new life as a church community not for our own enjoyment, but because God wants to use us to do something for the people who are not here this morning. But as we ask ourselves what it is that God is sending us to do, we need to remain close to the foolish wisdom of Jesus.
Many of us would like to get more involved in helping the poor and underserved members of our community. But action for social justice and community service can become something we do because it makes us feel better about ourselves, after which we go back to the same lives we were leading before, self-satisfied and spiritually unchanged. Or we can throw ourselves passionately into some social cause only to give up in despair after a little while because we can’t see that we’re getting any results from our efforts.
But my dad and I didn’t go to visit my Uncle J.D. because we felt sorry for him and wanted to cheer him up. We didn’t go because we felt obliged to as his closest living relatives, and wanted to acquit ourselves of our guilt. We didn’t go for him at all. We went because we needed a blessing. We went because not to have gone would have been to cut off something in our own souls, leaving us less human.
Maybe the mission of St. John’s is something like that. Maybe all the pain St. John’s has been through, and the difficulties we still face in becoming a viable congregation, are actually a blessing. Maybe we are being trained to see how God really works in the world, and to hope for what really matters. If so, then surely we know that this blessing is not just for us. It awaits its fulfillment out there, where our brothers and sisters (and uncles) are also struggling, also suffering, also wondering where God is to be found. Maybe St. John’s is a place people learn to be present to that pain not with the false hope of a quick fix but with hearts broken open and flowing with the foolish wisdom of Christ. It’s not really something we do, more something we are, that arises out of our own need for mercy, for meaning, and wisdom and hope. That, and God’s blessing.
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