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