Sermon for Ending of a Pastoral Relationship
Bishop James Mathes
Sermon for Ending of a Pastoral Relationship
St. Timothy's, San Diego
Wednesday, December 6, 2006
John 14: 15-21
Come Holy Spirit: Touch our minds and think with them, touch our lips and speak with them and touch our hearts and set them on fire with love for you. AMEN.
I.
I would love to begin this sermon tonight with some bit of humor or light moment, but I simply cannot find it. I feel great, great sorrow this night. Tonight we acknowledge the depth of a division that we seem unable to bridge.
This community, begun in hope and sustained by the enthusiasm of so many, is rending. Tonight is a night of tears. We have failed. We seem hopelessly divided to the point where some remain and others move to another place to create their own vision of church.
II.
The central point of this division seems to be whether one group or another is biblical. And so, let me begin tonight by making what some may consider an outlandish assertion: those who remain and those who leave in this congregation and throughout the Episcopal Church are acting completely biblically.
For the biblical stories tell us a history of division. It began with the sons of Adam. Jacob introduced deception. Jacob’s son practiced conspiracy. Division first became institutionalized after Solomon when the Northern Kingdom went its way. The disciples of Jesus sought authority over each other and then fled in the wake of Jesus’ arrest.
The church learned well the biblical story of division. East split from West. Rome had an odd generation with three popes. Ninty-nine thesis, banged on a door in Wittenberg, began a moment that swirled the church from reformation to fracture to bloody war. And in England, our ecclesial heirs birthed a church out of a king’s political expediency.
And in our church as in our nation, a civil war split us for a season over the question of slavery supported by biblical interpretation on both sides. More recently, we seem to come apart from human sexuality. Division and separation has been visited upon this diocese, where your bishop writes strong letters to rectors that some find harsh. Division and separation has been in this parish, where a senior warden writes strong letters to the congregation inviting some to leave. Yes, we are a completely biblical people. We have lived into a biblical story where we have not tolerated each other nor abided the situation in which we find ourselves.
Obviously, while it is biblical in the sense of being in the Bible, it is not wholesome or holy. It is the mark of human sin. And it is a mark of our failure to be what God has called us to be. Please hear me well: this failure, this mark of sin is upon each of us. Let this always be the case about us, those who remain and those who depart, that we humbly acknowledge that each of us has fallen short. Each of us asks for and deserves forgiveness—but let me return to that later.
III.
What is particularly vexing about dealing with our brokenness in this age is that we become the focus and preoccupation of those who style themselves as the fourth estate. Newspapers distill our issues, as they interpret them, into 750 or 1500 word stories. Television is even more superficial; last week’s story on Channel 10, gave the story a measured two minutes and fourteen seconds. All of us, those staying and those who are leaving, would agree that the Episcopal Church is defined by much, much more. Yet, they come tonight to watch us and to show and tell others about our grief, our brokenness, our humanity.
A few weeks ago, the San Diego Union Tribune published a story about the Episcopal Church under the headline, “A Fractured Church.” The story was frustrating not because anything in it was untruth; it was factually correct. What was frustrating was that the facts were aligned in such a way as to paint an inaccurate picture of the church, especially the church as it was assembled on that day in Vista. But sometimes even the Union Tribune can unintentionally create a teachable moment. As I pondered the headline, “A Fractured Church,” I wondered what church is not fractured.
In just a little while, we will celebrate the Eucharist. On your behalf, I will raise the host and in an awesome silence, break the bread. We call it the Fraction. That fraction is, of course, the remembrance of Jesus’ fracture and breaking on the hard wood of the cross for us. It is also recognition that we too are fractured and broken and in need of God’s healing, saving, and reconciling grace. In the end, it is only a broken, fractured church that can carry with credibility the cross of Jesus into the world. And so in that sense, we are fractured and will always be fractured.
IV.
Yet, even as I make articulate this profound theological truth, I am not naïve. I am aware that those who are leaving feel that the Episcopal Church has moved beyond what is acceptable, as has been asserted, we are no longer “orthodox”—that is, right-believing.
So, let me be clear. The Episcopal Church is orthodox; the Episcopal Church is about following Jesus as the Christ. I believe that these conflicts and contortions of ours, in these surreal days, are a result of delving ever more deeply into the gospels. They are about the Jesus who gathers all of us around the table: the gay and the straight, the rich and the poor, the brilliant and the challenged, the beautiful and the ugly. We rightly discuss and sometimes argue about the nature of this community and its boundaries and contours, but we cannot argue what is the yearning of Jesus’ heart:
I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.
Jesus wants us to be one; around this table, at this shared meal, which we state in the burial office is nothing less than a foretaste of the heavenly banquet. Jesus calls us all to be in one flock; we scatter at our peril. And so for those who wish to know what the Episcopal Church believes and what it stands for, it stands for nothing. No, it kneels! It kneels as a broken church at the Eucharist feast of Jesus. It is a church that believes that this is what our shepherd will have us to do. It is a church that abides difference because that is what Jesus did. This assembling has placed us in a posture where we ask of each other hard questions for which there are not easy answers. It moves us to fracture, but this does not mean even in this brokenness that we must come apart.
V.
In this night of tears, we are aware that some will move apart and leave this parish community of faith, this sacred space, this ministry, to which they have given so much. The clergy, Russell and Larry, will join them. And so we must end a pastoral relationship. Russell, you lay aside your rectorship; Larry, you give up being associate rector. Both of you are ending your work as priests in the Episcopal Church the church which formed you and called you into ministry. This is a source of sadness to you; I share that deep grief. And you and those who go with you are disassociating yourselves from my pastoral leadership as your bishop; that is a decision is a source of unspeakable pain to me. But I accept your decision.
As we end tonight, I feel the need to say four things to those who are departing. First, for whatever ways that I have failed you and hurt you, I ask for your forgiveness. In return, for those ways that I have felt failed and hurt by you, I offer you my forgiveness. And this is not sippy and insincere forgiveness, but it is an action of self-empty which is humanly imperfect but my effort to follow Jesus. I am mindful that some of you may not be able to go there tonight. It may take you so time. However, for your spiritual health and in faithfulness to Jesus, I urge to strive in that direction. The third thing I offer you is this: I love you. I love you in the name of Jesus and even as you depart beg you to stay. It is a love born out of who you are even in this conflict, who you are in your becoming, and who we will be in the day of our Lord. And so, forgiven and forgiving, and always loving you, I must say a fourth, final and hardest thing, good bye. I say good bye accepting your decision. I say good bye, knowing that our action of separation will be repaired by Jesus Christ in the Advent which we wait. As we leave this night, our Advent cry should never be more urgent, “Come, Lord Jesus, Come.”
I began by noting that we are living into the biblical story of conflict and division. Let us never forget that that is only one part of the story, and certainly not the end of the story, any more than the fraction is the end of the Eucharistic feast. In the Eucharist, we partake of the body and blood of Jesus in a belief of his resurrection and our new life in his name. That is what our story is about. In some way that we cannot see, what happens in this fraction is related to our becoming whole, our new life, our resurrection and our Lord’s Prayer, “thy kingdom come.” Some will return to this sanctuary and continue to make it their spiritual home and others will depart for another more nomadic spiritual dwelling. Let our shared prayer be found in the verses that we sung a few minutes ago:
Perverse and foolish oft I strayed, but yet in love he sought me,
and on his shoulder gently laid and home, rejoicing brought me.
Thou spread’st a table in my sight; thy unction grace, bestoweth;
and oh, what transport of delight from thy pure chalice floweth.
Come, Lord Jesus, come.