Not gonna lie, this is a hard Sunday to preach. By now most of you know that I will be retiring before the end of this year, because my husband John is retiring from his career in public finance at the end of July. I love being a priest, and I especially love being your priest, but my marital vows preceded my ordination vows, and I love my husband a great deal too. In fact, this very weekend marks 37 years of marriage for us, since the day I promised John that I would go where he goes, stay where he stays, and his people would be my people. And he’s certainly returned the favor. He has loved you—my people for these past almost-five years—as his own. We will both miss you more than you can imagine.
And now what? John and I actually don’t know. We’re both in our seventh decade of life—we’re thinking of it as the sabbath decade—so it’s certainly a season to invest in each other, in our health and in our family. We have dreams of travel, but since I won’t finish up at Trinity until September, we don’t have any specific plans at the moment. And if all of us have learned anything in recent years, it is to hold our plans lightly. Or—as the old preacher’s joke goes—if you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans.
But here’s what I know we will do, come what may. We will keep the Sabbath, in some 21st century form. We will proclaim Jesus Christ. We will be people of healing, as God gives us the strength to be, on the sabbath and every other day. When everything else seems uncertain, today’s readings give us a clear roadmap. Be Jesus’ own people. Do whatever he tells us to do. You can begin by listening to the Bible like we are doing in church. Recall also that, through our congregational Vital + Thriving process, we’ve been praying scripture for two years, in order to recognize and then live into God’s promised and preferred future for Trinity. Your Vital+Thriving leadership has been praying through the whole process, and this year’s scripture is from Paul’s letter to the Philippians—
“Only, live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that, whether I come and see you or am absent and hear about you, I will know that you are standing firm in one spirit, striving side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel.”
Live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ. Stand firm in one spirit. Stive side by side. Only this. It really is that simple, although I’m not naïve enough to suggest that it’s easy.
Nor am I suggesting that the path forward from this junction is entirely clear, but I suspect that you’ll recognize it when you see it. In the Episcopal tradition, there is clarity available to us. We look for it in scripture, tradition and reason: the historic Anglican three-legged stool.
And—if we want to get a bit Wesleyan about it— we can also look for clarity in our own experience. John Wesley described it as a strange warming of the heart, which I’m sure you’ve experienced too. I know that you recognize God’s voice, even if you sometimes doubt it. As I prepare to trust God with my own next steps, I have only one word of counsel, and it would be this: trust. Trust yourself, trust your church, trust in God’s promised and preferred future for Trinity. In which I’ve played a particular role, as have all of you. And the play is not over. People here need you to safeguard this place of peace and beauty in the heart of the city. People also need Canon Filemon, Canon Shane Patrick, Canon Adrien and Deacon Bertram. All of us are jars of clay, and all of us hold a treasure of a church. Whether I come and see you or am absent and hear about you, I trust you to care for each other, because you are precious to God and to God’s mission in this place.
I’m not writing my own eulogy today: we’ve got months of ministry yet to do together, while you’re searching for the next priest that God is already preparing for you. But I do want to remind you about some of what we’ve accomplished in these past almost 5 years, because I think it teaches us something about what you can and yet will do. In the world of Jesuit prayer, which is my native language, this practice of intentionally remembering what we’ve done with God—where we’ve collaborated with God, you might say—is called an examen. That is, a prayerful opportunity to recognize and acknowledge that God is with us, always helping us to do our best under whatever our circumstances may be. We can do this daily, weekly in church, or over the course of a whole ministry. Which our time together has been.
With God’s help, we’ve accomplished beautiful things here at Trinity. Too many to count, really, and that would make for a boring sermon anyway. Consider where we are now, though. Our historic campus is busy with service to the poor, and students learning, and food served to the hungry, seven day a week. We have beautiful new custom art installations. We offer a full array of classes for children and adults. Our vibrant multicultural ministry is a model for other churches. St. Mark’s Chapel and our Pray-ground here in the sanctuary offer welcome to all ages. Everywhere we turn, there is something new and vibrant to celebrate at Trinity. You and God made all this happen.
But I’d like to pause for a moment and consider two specific projects: one completed a year ago, and one underway just now. On your way in, did you notice how welcoming our Narthex—that’s our entryway vestibule—is? That didn’t happen just because Javier helps keep our spaces tidy, although he does: it happened because several people let me know that they wanted us to be able to offer some Sunday morning respite to our homeless neighbors. So with that vision and a small grant from St. Andrews in Saratoga, we were able to get a new rug, furniture, and a custom cabinet to hold food and water and emergency supplies. The Narthex Welcome Center is a small project that reflects the big heart of Trinity. Need, vision love and partnership enabled us to create respite and—indeed—Sabbath for our hurting neighbors.
Meanwhile, our own Sharon Martin—whom we haven’t seen for a while because she is recovering from some illness—has been hard at work at home arranging for some breathtaking stained glass windows to be moved from St. Marks to here. She wrote about it in our newsletter last Friday. Dozens of people have donated to the cause, and our diocese has agreed to match the donation, in order that the treasures of one of our beloved neighbors can shine in a new way. Notice the pattern again: need, vision love and partnership, which allows the gifts of the past to continue forward with us in new ways.
God is always calling us to look to the past for the truth of our future, so remember these things. Remember that you have experienced captivity, and that the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day. Remember to rest and trust. Remember that David and his companions were nourished by the bread of the presence. Remember that feeding the hungry is what Jesus does and has done for us. Remember that we are not crushed and not forsaken, even when things seem hard or confusing. Remember that we are mortal, and that’s OK. We carry transitions and endings and death in our bodies, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. What God has given us to do and to be may not be easy, but it really is this simple—
“Only, live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that, whether I come and see you or am absent and hear about you, I will know that you are standing firm in one spirit, striving side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel.”
