As we say goodbye in our hearts to Karen, and take these next steps as a community of faith, I suggested in my sermons of the last two weeks that we have two tasks that we must begin to accomplish together as a church community.
The first is to become aware again that as a church we are on a journey, and we have always been on one. Whichever way we decide to go tomorrow, we are sailing our boat on a river that we have always been sailing on. And while we may not yet be able see what lies around the next bend, we are determined to continue to explore wherever this journey takes us. If we are nothing else here at MPC, we are intrepid journeyers; explorers in our own right. In T.S. Eliot’s poem Quartets, he said, two things about journeying: “To make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.” At this moment in our life at MPC, we are at both an end and a beginning. Eliot ended his poem by saying, “We shall not cease from exploration; and at the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time.” And we do indeed know ourselves much better today than we did 12 years ago.
If reawakening our sense of journey is the first part of our task, then the second part is this: to articulate who we are as a community of faith in order to plan that journey. I choose the word articulating because saying who we are involves discovering more than we thought we knew about where we have already been, while discovering even more than we can imagine about who we are today. And saying who we are will open ourselves up to God’s spirit so that we can discover where we might go tomorrow.
As we move forward in our journey we will begin by asking ourselves some particular questions in order to try out some particular answers. “Who do we think we are?” will be one of the first questions that we ask ourselves. “Who do others say that we are?” might be a good follow-up question. We will begin by asking each other, “Who do YOU think we are here at MPC?” and then taking a moment to listen for their response and consider what it may reveal to us. If we listen to each other carefully, we might be surprised to discover how many different ways the Spirit of God has revealed herself at MPC.
But we are not starting this journey of self-discovery from scratch. We are starting from starting once again from the place that we began twelve years ago, and from which we began some twenty eight years before that, and we do indeed know it better today. We know, for instance, that not only are we as individuals marvelously made, but so too is our community marvelously made. The same Spirit who gave each of us life has created community life in this church. And we also understand that even as God knows every one of us and has joyful and meaningful opportunities in store for each of us, so too does God have meaningful and joyful opportunities in store for our church. We are definitely individuals here at MPC, but as members of a community of faith we are also much greater than the sum of our parts.
We can begin this journey reflecting upon what we do in our Sunday celebration: Every Sunday we end our services by reminding ourselves of what our primary task is: to go out into the world in love, to hold on to what is good, to lift up the hurting and the disheartened, to return no one evil for evil. We challenge ourselves to take our deeply felt meanings and our passions into the wider world. And whenever we do that, we will encounter the mystery of the divine in new ways. We will hear the voice of the Spirit speaking to us in new voices. We will see the face of God in people we will meet. We may even end up saying, as that woman at the well said when she encountered God in person, “Come and listen to someone who has told me everything that is in my heart, everything that I have ever done.”
That same spirit who knows each of us, every hair on our head and every joy in our heart, will lead us again along our path tomorrow, as the Spirit has always done. Even if we don’t always say it, we still know it to be true in our hearts, and that is why we call ourselves a community of faith.
Blessings upon us all as we make our journey
Leonard