“Bon Voyage”
By Tom Reiber
June 29, 2003
Psalm 139:
day's Hebrew Bible reading is a selection of verses from Stephen Mitchell's translation* of Psalm 139:
Lord, you have searched me and known me;
You understand everything I do;
You are closer to me than my thoughts.
You see through my selfishness and weakness,
into my inmost self.
There is not one corner of my mind
That you do not know completely.
You are present before me, behind me,
And you hold me in the palm of your hand.
Such knowledge is too awesome to grasp:
So deep that I cannot fathom it.
Where can I go from your spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I take the wings of the morning
And fly to the ends of the sea,
Even there your hand will guide me
And your spirit will give me strength.
How measureless your mind is, Lord;
It contains inconceivable worlds
And is vaster than space, than time.
If ever I tried to fathom it,
I would be like a child counting
The grains of sand on a beach.
Search me, Lord; test me
To the depths of my inmost heart.
Since
this will be one of my last sermons here at Christ Church, Chuck suggested
revisiting some of the themes I've lifted up in previous sermons. Having been on the listening end of a number
of sermons, I thought a little recap might not be such a bad idea. It's funny how it is with sermons. No matter how good or how bad, after a few
days—or hours—you go onto other things and rarely think of them again. And as my wife reminds me, sometimes during
the sermon your mind drifts to other things. Maybe your experience is different from that. I'd like to think so, but who am kidding?
The other thing
I wanted to do was begin the process of saying goodbye. Julie recommended a little book called Running
Through the Thistles,[1]
which was written by a minister who had a bad experience saying goodbye, who
then tried to learn from it. The title
(Running Through the Thistles) comes from a childhood experience the
author had. He and his two older
brothers used to walk home from a rural school, which they went to
barefoot. There was a short cut
through a field that had a bunch of thistles in it. So they had the option of going around the thistles or running
through them. The author's preference was
to go around, but his older brothers invariably took him by the hand and raced
on through. His point, is that saying
goodbye is kinda like that. We usually
go around the thistles, avoiding our feelings altogether. Or we run through them, plowing ahead as
fast as we can and with a minimum of discomfort. One of the most valuable insights was the observation that how we
say goodbye is informed by how we feel about death. In fact he proposes that the way we say both hello and goodbye is
intimately bound up with our thoughts and feelings about death. Greetings and farewells are important
moments in a relationship, book-ending all that passes in between. And because the problem of death is so
central to the human condition, our attitudes toward it get played out when we
say hello and goodbye. So thanks Julie,
for the light reading as I pack up my things.
Actually
I'm grateful for this little book because it has helped me be more intentional
about saying goodbye and being open to the mix of emotions associated with the
process. Before reading it a lot of my
emotions were percolating under the surface. That's the frame of mind I was when I met with Chuck. I had just heard the night before that they
had offered me the job, so it was suddenly official. But neither of us had had sufficient time to process what that
meant, so at the end of our meeting we each began to fiddle around with things
and walk in different directions until at one point he were calling out to each
other down the hallway. Some of that
male resistance to emotion Chuck described last week.
But the book was
helpful and I recommend it to you all, not just in relation to my leaving, but
in relation to Wayne's looming departure in a year. Endings and goodbyes aren't easy, but when we run from the
feelings we are running from part of what it means to be alive. The bottom line of the article, as with most
things of any psychological value, is an invitation to deal more openly with
our feelings.
I was reminded of
this when I ran into Earl Williams the other day here at the Church. By this time I had read the article and it
had helped me focus on the importance of opening up to the process of saying
goodbye. Earl, who didn't need to read
an article to know how to be honest, said point blank that he was ambivalent
about my going. He was happy for me
since he figured this was a step forward career wise, but he didn't like to see
me go. Then with his characteristically
positive attitude he waxed philosophical and talked about how every ending
means a new beginning. And he talked
about how coming to Christ Church five or so years ago was a new beginning for
him, and what it has meant for him to find a church home. I appreciated Earl's candor. Of course it takes a certain amount of trust
and a basic comfort level to share on that level. But we've got that. Standing there in the new building that was once a driveway, I felt the
power of being part of this community to nurture authenticity, compassion and
Christian love.
When I look back
on my time with you all, it will be with a certain fondness of this being my
first real call. It'll be with
gratitude for this having been a place for me to open to God's claim on my
life, a place where I was able to take my first few faltering steps in
ministry, a place where I prayed with and got to know some very special people.
I've drawn up a short list of some
of the things I'll never forget, but I decided early on I'd save that for the
written version of the sermon. You know
me well enough to know that I could never read it without an emotional
meltdown. But for you readers, here's
the list:
Julie
coming to work with Matthew as an infant.
Praying
with the Stephen Ministers.
Maria
Decesare telling me to buy my wife flowers.
Talking
late into the night with Squire Knox in Nicaragua.
Michael
Keane giving his socks to a homeless man.
Daniel O'Sullivan writing me a
poem.
Noel's
movie based on our High Point camping trip.
Lucy
Wells telling me Rosa Parks comes to her in her dreams.
Dan
Rufolo playing the piano at the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen.
Wayne's
40th anniversary celebration.
Serving
Isabelle Devenney communion.
Mike
McMillan retrieving a lost bracelet for Chuck's daughter, Jesse.
Landscaping
at Rob's house (and Haley on the little motorcycle).
As
far as revisiting some of the themes that I've tried to emphasize, the main
thing I'd want to say is that it is still possible, even in these modern times,
to connect with God or more broadly speaking, with the spiritual side of
life. The United Church of Christ
slogan these days is “God is still speaking.” And there's a reason we've made that the slogan. Too many people wonder in their heart of
hearts why God spoke to people long ago but doesn't any more. I believe God is still speaking. We just need to learn to listen. Jesus repeatedly said his message was for
those with the eyes to see and ears to hear, implying there's a certain
subtlety involved.
One way we do this
is by listening to our dreams. That's
another one of the things I've tried to emphasize. Of course it's not just in our dreams, but in our waking lives
through signs and symbols.
And sometimes,
when we're lucky, the inner, subjective world of dreams and the outer dimension
of signs and symbols come together and we glimpse the sacred tapestry holding
it all together.[2] This is what C. G. Jung was trying to get at
with his notion of synchronicity: the idea that there is a meaningful
relationship between the unfolding of your inner life and your life here in the
outside world.[3] Getting in touch with that opens us up to
the spirituality of everyday life.
Here's an example
from my spiritual life. I had a dream
at the start of my ministry here about being shot out of a cannon, which I felt
was significant at the time, though I eventually forgot out about it. Then this past spring I was in Jordan,
having just returned from Baghdad. I
was in a barbershop talking to a group of men who were curious about my being
there. I happened to have my video
camera on me, so I showed them some footage from a maternity hospital run by
Dominican nuns. Just then I looked up
at the TV and saw a there was a show on about a guy getting shot out of a
cannon. Not just any cannon, but a red,
white and blue one. Crazy.
So
who knows? Maybe it was just a weird,
random coincidence. But I tend to
believe less a
