First Parish in Concord

Choose to Bless the World - A Sermon on the Occasion of Our Annual Meeting 2009

Written by Gary E. Smith Sunday, 14 June 2009 00:00

Reading

Choose To Bless The World

By Rev. Dr. Rebecca Parker, President of Starr King School for the Ministry

Your gifts, whatever you discover them to be‚
can be used to bless or curse the world.

The mind's power,
The strength of the hands,
The reaches of the heart,
The gift of speaking, listening, imagining, seeing, waiting

Any of these can serve to feed the hungry,
Bind up wounds,
Welcome the stranger,
Praise what is sacred,
Do the work of justice
Or offer love.

Any of these can draw down the prison door,
Hoard bread,
Abandon the poor,
Obscure what is holy,
Comply with injustice
Or withhold love.

You must answer this question:
What will you do with your gifts?

Choose to bless the world.

The choice to bless the world can take you into solitude
To search for the sources of power and grace;
Native wisdom, healing, and liberation.

More, the choice will draw you into community,
The endeavor shared,
The heritage passed on,
The companionship of struggle,
The importance of keeping faith,
The life of ritual and praise,
The comfort of human friendship,
The company of earth
The chorus of life welcoming you.

None of us alone can save the world.
Together‚ that is another possibility waiting.

Sermon

We call the first Sunday we gather in September Opening Sunday, but I am loathe to call this Sunday in June Closing Sunday, although in some sense that’s what it is--with a tip of the hat to the preachers and worship leaders and musicians and ushers and loyal congregants who will keep watch here all summer for the rest, the rest who will sleep in, go on trips, take a break, catch a breath, store up the summer warmth and all the green and blue of the season to use when the months inevitably get colder and browner and more grey. 

This is the end of our 374th year as a congregation, the ending of my thirty-seventh year as a minister, the ending of my twenty-first year as a minister with all of you, the ending of a year which began with worship at Kerem Shalom, our generous, extremely generous and patient and forbearing friends at the end of Elm Street. 

We began this cycle of Sundays last September, we said “hello” and “welcome back” and “how was your summer,” and then we stayed at Kerem Shalom longer than we ever thought, delays in construction, new permits, new design, unexpected twists and turns, returning here after Thanksgiving, a solitary fire fighter watching over us each week in December while a temporary second exit was constructed, while a temporary ramp for access was constructed.  Christmas Eve was outside, how many would come, would the rain let up, would the candles stay lit, what would the ministers do at home on Christmas Eve??!!

But it is June, and we are at the end of a cycle of Sundays, and I am remembering a story told by the writer Francine Prose, one of those names like the Filipino Cardinal named Sin and the dentist named Payne. Francine Prose writes about endings, as in the ending of a story she was writing, a sad story, she says, for which she could find no right ending.  It was redemption she wanted at the end, and she can find no redemption.

So, she says, she “put the story aside and waited until one autumn morning.  We were living in the country near a reservoir,” she says.  “Our children were young.  Returning from driving our son to nursery school, my husband spotted a giant osprey, flying above the road, struggling to carry a huge fish in its claws.  When at last it dropped the fish, my husband noted which light pole it landed near.  He stopped, turned around, drove back, and found the seven-pound bass, whose eyes were still bright when he brought it home and carried it up to my study.  At first, I screamed.  Then I said, ‘Dinner.’  And then I had the end of my story, which ends improbably, but magically, with a fish dropping out of the sky.”

I have no idea what I would have done with that story except that it speaks somehow of the fragility of it all, certainly for the seven-pound bass, and for the rest of us, too, the year we’ve had, the economy, the delays in construction, the elevator in boxes, the capital campaign fund raising suspended, the annual campaign falling short, the fragility of it all, the preciousness of it all, the enduring nature of it all, and when I think about the sermons I’ve preached from this pulpit this year, that has been the theme, the same themes every year:  pay attention, be grateful, take hold of one another.  It has been the same sermon over and over, I know, and so I am grateful for your patience and your persistence and your forbearance through it all, as I simply let those words come out of me that I most need to hear.  Pay attention, be grateful, take hold of one another.

Watching over the renovation of a building is a spiritual discipline I have learned, how maddening it is, how impatient I am, how it is that we must always let go, and we must always receive, “fish dropping out of the sky.”  And, I am thinking of who Jenny is and who Melissa and Beth and Angela are, who Pam and Jane and Doug are, who Faith and Mary-Wren and Alyssa are, who Mary Elizabeth and Margie and who all the people are with whom I live and work, the word “all” here meaning it is dangerous to start a list of names, you will always omit some name. Let us say I am thinking of all of you who lifted us up this year when you stepped forward, when you wrote that note, made that call, brought that food, found a way to take care of me and us and one another, through it all, through belt-tightening and job losses, and endowment shrinking.  I am awash in gratitude for all of this, for all of you.

Think of the children’s game of Leap Frog, the rules of which I have long forgotten, if there ever were rules.  The imagery is enough, imagery on the way to metaphor. There we all are, leaping onto and then over the back of one after another in order to get ahead, the motion of catapulting up and over your back makes me leap higher, helps me go forward, helps me see things a bit differently.  First me and then you and then you, an endless line, moving and tumbling ahead over the green lawn in the late afternoon sun. This is a definition of life, I am thinking.

Whatever else this Sunday, June 14, 2009, may be, this is certainly a day for celebration, can we not say that, celebration for our coming in and in our going out, celebration in our singing and in our praying, this is a day for celebrating the community we have here, a day for celebrating the community we have made here.  We are a people who have chosen to bless the world, as Rebecca Parker writes in the poem our choir sang today.  We are a people who keep moving forward, off first your back and then mine, tumbling sometimes haphazardly, sometimes methodically, sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally, but always surely and certainly tumbling into the future.

“To feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know,” Pablo Neruda writes, “from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses--that is something still greater and more beautiful, because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things…Humanity is somehow together.”  To feel the love of people here, he says, that is something.  To feel the love and support of people we do not know, that is something else.

This is a definition of congregation, too, feeling the love and support of people we do not know.  You might call it keeping faith with people, across space and across time.  Here in this room, in the next hour, we will keep faith with the past and with the future.  We will act out the ritual of annual meeting, an event that stretches back in time to all those who have made this place possible for us, and not only “place” as in the granite foundation and the white clapboards, but also the sweat and the tears that slowly built this place, brought these people together, kept these people together.  Can you imagine how many thousands of committee meetings must have been held within these walls, the millions of dollars given to keep the place afloat, the millions and millions of volunteer hours spent here?  These are people we do not know, most of them lived generations before us, but they somehow kept faith with us just as we will surely keep faith with all those coming in generations after us, out into time.

“It goes on one at a time,” Marge Piercy says, and I think she means by “it” something like community.  “It starts when you care to act…It starts when you say We and know who you mean.”   These forebears of ours learned to say “We” and know who they meant.  And so it is today, we will hear reports and we will pass resolutions and we will say We and know who we mean.  We will be “widening out the boundaries of our being,” in Pablo Neruda’s words, amazing enough.

This is not a Closing Sunday, any more than next September when the whole big enterprise gears up again is Opening Sunday, but we are marking something when we give these designations to both.  We are pausing here in these moments of exuberant song and deep prayer to pay attention, to be grateful, to take hold of one another.  We have walked together these past months, and we have endured.  Those big black doors out there are the doors to hope, and I am grateful that I found my way here to walk through them, and I am blessed that you have joined me here.