Final Sermon at St Philips
Deuteronomy 3 & 31
January 21, 2001
Let us pray:
It takes a while to and your way
among all the ways of work,
and I suppose a man is never sure.
Take me for example.
I might have taught grammar to freshmen,
history to the cataloging mind,
or journalism to young William Allen Whites.
I considered medicine,
thought of suturing my way across the ripped and torn pieces of humanity
who bleeds out life
on the bucket seats of our auto world.
I even thought of insurance
as a way to save whole families
of widows and orphans.
I could have bought it the world with a credit card
saved the world with green stamps,
given the world away with gift certificates.
I would have sold almost anything.
But,
You called me to be a pastor,
And here I sit among people –
pushing prayers,
swapping jokes,
trading self-esteem for longevity.
Begging for building funds,
rustling a Catholic now and then,
hawking the urban problem.
Picking pockets with cornmircee posts,
pirating among the open pulpits,
auctioning God to the lowest bidder.
Lord, just exactly what was it you had in mind
when we talked so long ago?
Would you please go over chat just one more life? Slowly.
Amen
God shows him the Promised Land, and tells him, “You are not going to @ there, for your time is done.” if Moses were anything like me, he probably would begin to argue. “After all,” he might have said, “We walked for forty/ years without our feet hurting. We found new ways of sharing leadership. We learned about you through those tablets of commandments. You brought about all those wonderful miracles. So why do I only get a glimpse, a hint of what is to come? Why not more?”
When exits and entrances appear in our lives, we often miss the small miracles that come with chosen times. We usually want to hold on tight to the familiar; we want more. But the truth is that a door shuts, and another opens, you say goodbye to some things, and find you’re saying hello to others; a baby is born,- a child becomes an adult, an old person dies, a man retires. One leaves a room, and another enters. The realism about when we say, “Yes” to God and allow ourselves to step into the future. For God is at the beginnings and endings.
Going back to the story of Moses’ final days, we recall that God makes sure that he will pass on his leadership role to a younger person. We’re not told much about that conversation, but I believe it might have gone something like this: “Moses,” God must have said, “You have led these people for a long time. You have tried as best you could to meet their demands. You have fought the good fight, but now it’s time for some new blood. I do this so that your people will not be overly dependent upon one person for their future
That’s an important conversation for all who lead and all who follow God’s way. It’s important for me to underscore this as our relationship of rea# and parish comes to a close.
It’s been a wonderful experience for the past twenty-GBPhree years to share my ministry with you. I am also very aware that you can do it very well without me. You have the gift of reaching out to God and each other on your own.
Forgive me, when I blocked your access to God, stepped in when you could have ministered on your own, encouraged dependence on a round collar. Made God seem so complicated that one needed a Seminary education to approach the source of hope and faith. Forgive me.
I suppose Moses could have voiced such a prayer. You will recall the story behind the first lesson. Moses had been wandering forty years in the wilderness. And, now that he was becoming a little long in the tooth, God tells him it is time to say goodbye. Can’t you just imagine, Moses, standing with a pained expression, saying, “God, just exactly what did you have in mind when we spoke so long ago?
These past few weeks, I’ve had that Moses feeling. I’ve thought back to the forty-plus years of wandering in the wilderness of ministry. Sometimes barely surviving, hanging on by my fingertips, listening to the murmuring of parishioners, and then, as I became long in the tooth, preparing to say Goodbye
Goodbyes are never easy. It wasn’t so for Moses, and it certainly hasn’t been for me. Letting go, losing one’s grip, and preparing to exit is hard work.
You have to be willing to say goodbye to some things in order to say hello to others. you have co look for God within the exits.
But, let us return to Moses, whom we left standing on the mountaintop_ He has led the small band of Hebrews for some forty years, through hard times and times when God seemed very close. But, there were also periods in Moses’ story where he must have pulled back and said, “This isn’t what my mother had in mind when she left me to be brought up by the Pharaoh’s daughter. I could have made a pretty good administrator back in Egypt. I’m a big-city person, not an outward-bound type.
This past year, I’ve discovered through his writings a fascinating Rabbi named Lawrence Kushner. Kushner reminded me that God has assigned each one of us a certain role, and it’s the only one we are going to get. “Sometimes we don’t like our plans,” he said. “We wish we were someone else.” I can certainly identify with those words. I, for instance, always wanted to be a professional tennis player. My mother wanted me to be a bishop.
But God said, ” Sorry those parts have already been taken by Pete Samoras and Robert Shahan. You’ve got to be a Rector in a small city in Arizona- That’s the one part we’ve got for yoy. You want it or not?”
Looking once again at Moses as he encounters God in his last days I sometimes have acted and felt like the Priest in Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, which I saw at the Lincoln Center many years ago. The priest took on more and more of the burdens of his people. He became the oracle of his community. This was symbolically acted out by the piling on of layer after layer of vestments. Finally, in the last scene, he slowly takes off his vestments, thus symbolizing that he no longer will assume the expectation, the demands, which make people so dependent on him. When all the vestments are dropped, the Priest is revealed as just a GBPlawed, vulnerable human being like the rest of us.
The ending is one of the most beautiful elements in contemporary theater. The Priest, who is now on stage as just an ordinary person, is brought to life by the singing and touch of a child. Then the child takes the hand of another adult who comes on, singing of a new day ahead. The Promised Land is glimpsed as the audience and actors join hands.
So Now I can capture the mystery of my life and yours – the miracle of ministry that comes about as we join hands. In this is the beginning and ending/fan our searching for God.
e.e. Cummings sums up Idlife, as well as Moses’, with the words,
“With you, I leave a remembrance of miracles.” I leave you with the remembrance that we have touched over the years. Sometimes our touch has been light and subtle. Sometimes gs it’s been a reaching out across a chasm of disagreements. And, sometimes, it’s been a lover’s touch that bridges the gap, for a second, between separated people.
But, the miracle is that we have touched: in deaths and births, in good times, and sad times, in tears and in laughter. We have touched.
And so, I leave you with the remembrance of small miracles. I leave you with sadness and gratitude for those moments together that we have glimpsed the Promised Land. And I leave you with the knowledge that God is not finished with us yet
” Lord, just exactly what was it you had in mind when we talked so long ago. Would you please go over that- just one more life
Amen