Over this decade I have tried in my addresses to reflect on something having to do with our faith or mission, but in this final installment, a kind of epilogue, I want to claim a point of personal privilege and be more autobiographical. What has come to my mind recently is my own ordaining bishop, Alex Stewart. He was not much for process, hyperactive, with paper sticking out of his pockets, prone suddenly to toss books at you in his office, but also liable to remember something you said six months ago. Alex was the one who connected me with east Africa. He was also a big Red Sox fan, who once interrupted a phone conversation about my vocation to go see on the TV if the guy was safe at third. Obviously I have been morphing into him for some years now. Anyway, in 1999, a quarter century ago,I was headed to Wycliffe, and he, retired, was in chemotherapy. I felt I should offer some pastoral care to my old mentor. He wasn’t having any of it, and was more interested in how I was strategizing the new job. Finally it was time to leave, and I felt I needed to pray for him and bless him. Turn the tables as it were. But he beat me to it. He stood up first, hospital gown, drip and all, and let forth a grand Aaronic blessing. Then he said, ‘get out of here, you have things to do, and so do I,’ turned and vanished from the room. Well, I am not dying, or rather I am dying only in the sense that we all are, but you get the analogy.
My text this morning is from Philippians 3. Paul has rolled out his CV: who doesn’t want at times to justify oneself by achievement, in spite of the voice of conscience within that reminds us that there is an equally long list of busts and bad ideas, and even the accomplishments had a great deal to do with companions who came alongside us? But Paul’s rejection of living from his own accomplishments comes from another, deeper place. He has come to see his professional and spiritual cv as all rubbish, he says. For his attention is now fixed on Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, which turns our gaze back, true, only to turn it decisively forward, to what lies ahead for us, because of Him.
Human beings are always looking for home, though when you get there it isn’t what you recall. But we are built to seek it still. Just like Odysseus…or an old priest settling as close to Fenway Park as he can get. And that is what Paul is looking for, though it would seem ‘home’ is what he is here setting out from, what he is leaving. Nonetheless he does not look back but forward. And so are we to do as well, though for us Christians ‘home’ is complicated, Paul tells us we don’t have an earthly one, and that we have another home, as a result of which we are here travelling as exiles. For us Christians ‘home’ is something both ahead of us and with us all along. How can that be?
The answer is that Paul now must see everything, himself and his own story, all that has occurred, in the light of the resurrection. And what does that require? Here’s what he says- ‘forget what lies behind, straining for what lies ahead.’ To be sure, we have to make sure turning toward the resurrection is not just a pretext for avoiding the emotion of saying goodbye (whether that that was what my beloved mentor was doing I leave in abeyance!). Memory of what has preceded is now committed to God’s memory, blessedly better than my own. An era can end, and we look ahead, uniquely as Christians, confident that what comes next is part of the same enterprise, which was not ultimately ours.
I will publish some of my writings over the past decade, and in preparation for this I have reread what I have said over these years. I believe we are still, ten years on, what we aimed at then: a distinctive witness within the Episcopal Church, which we have sought to live out in the mode of friendship rather than conflict. There have also been surprises: I know more about novel viruses and disciplinary canons than I expected or wished. But what has remained the same is our desire to retrieve, hear, and live out the great doctrines of the faith we have inherited. This convention is a reprise of some of the features of our context into which we move. But I am very confident in, and expectant of, the faithfulness and creativity our new bishop and his team, and all of you will bring to ministry in this new moment.
Since I am in an autobiographical, and maybe a tad nostalgic mood, indulge me one last moment. This memory is not from 1999, but from 1975, another quarter century earlier. A year earlier still I had been converted, by the grace of God, to faith in Christ, and I at twenty had a vague notion I might be called to be a priest in the Episcopal Church. For reasons not clear to me, I had written every reservation with a church, and received one response: a job as assistant to the vicar of Our Father’s House, Ethete Wyoming, on the Arapaho Reservation, as well as educational tutor to the children in the group home overseen by his social worker wife. They offered a flat, use of an old Fiat, and nightly dinner with the couple. So on that August morning I arrived at Logan in Boston, said goodbye to my parents, and headed down the walkway to my gate. I felt uncertainty, curiosity, exhilaration- which is to say freedom, not only about an unknown land called ‘Wyoming’ but also about what the Lord had in mind for me! It was a new kind of freedom, the kind we all know, who have handed our lives over. The walkway had become an adventure. So I feel at this moment of my life as well.
Leave the past behind, and strain on to what lies ahead, says Paul. But we are not Lot’s wife, not forbidden a glance over our shoulder on the way. What I by contrast see in the backward glance is the providential hand of God, in things we, I, got right and wrong. I see a host of people given to me as companeros en el camino de Dios, so often the right person at the right moment. In the perplexity of early COVID time, a. deacon who is also a doctor calls me up and says ‘Bishop you don’t know it but you need my help,’ and proceeded to ride shotgun Sunday by Sunday as Covid advisor/ deacon/friend to Stephanie and me. Something similar happened throughout with so many of you. She serves here as a stand in for all the deacons, and is similar to so many lay leaders who have come alongside over this decade.
Three years ago I convened on zoom a Lenten group about ‘Being Christian and Being Old.’ It was a lively group, I as much a learner as a teacher with everyone else, which is to say, it was the best kind of adult Christian education. My body was already whispering to me that retirement wasn’t so far away. We considered the wisdom of self-knowledge in the Psalms, and then how John was foretold by the risen Jesus that he was bound to be taken where he did not wish to go. We considered old and wounded Oedipus finding harbor at the last at Colonus, Lear forgiven his foolishness by his daughter, and evangelical Anglican Jim Packer with his bracing rebuke, ‘retirement’ isn’t biblical!’ Do we dare plan for what we cannot see, but do we dare not to? Who knows, but our shared and humorous perplexity in the group was informative. At our best we each can feel, even here in the late innings, something like the exhilaration of that airport walkway, in the company of the wounded and risen One, who remembers the past for us, summons us as His cloud of witnesses, and is making all things new! Amen.
