No, What Are You Going To Do?

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Created on Sunday, 05 June 2011 01:00
Written by Gary E. Smith

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This is a sermon that has been widely advertised as my “last” sermon (Eliz calls it my terminal sermon). We’ll see about that. But, it does have this quality of putting some pressure on me, as in “this better be good.” Mindful of that all this spring, I have kept a folder handy in which I have thrown scraps of paper with quotations and ideas for today.

One of our former interns, four weeks ago, reminded me that the collective noun (a collective noun is, for example, a flock of birds) the collective noun for many crocodiles is a congregation of crocodiles, and I made a note of that and threw it into the folder for today. But, now in rereading it, it just doesn’t seem to have the traction for a full sermon, doesn’t fit the celebratory mood of the day: it’s too edgy, and seeing you as crocodiles is not the way I feel about you, well, most of you!

One note I threw into this June 5th folder was simply the word “retire,” with the suggestion to myself that I look up the etymology of the word. At first glance, the word is “tire”, as in “I’m tired,” and doesn’t “re-“ mean “again,” “tired again”? Actually, Google says, beginning in 1660 or so, “retire” meant, “to leave the company and go to bed.” Nothing there for a sermon, so I’ll put that aside.

My colleague in Bedford, John Gibbons, gave me a quotation months ago, from one of my favorite novels, Nicole Krauss’ THE HISTORY OF LOVE. I hope you’ve read the book; maybe even liked it. The story begins with an old man narrating. He lives alone and has resolved to be noticed every day, just to prove he’s living, so he’ll walk off the curb into traffic and make the cars brake or he’ll tip over something in the supermarket. Anything. In the passage John gave me, he talks about how much he likes to go to the movies. “It’s always a big event for me,” he says. “Maybe I buy some popcorn and – if people are around who’ll look – spill it. I like to sit up front, I like for the screen to fill my whole view so that there is nothing to distract me from the moment. And then I want the moment to last forever.

“I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to watch it up there, blown up. I would say larger than life, but I’ve never understood that expression. What is larger than life? To sit in the front row and look up at a beautiful girl’s face two stories high and have the vibrations of her voice massaging your legs is to be reminded of the size of life. So I sit in the front row. If I leave with a crick in my neck… it was a good seat. I’m a man who wanted to be as large as life.” This particular quotation has possibilities for the day.

I like the notion of wanting to sit in the front row, “for the screen to fill my whole view so that there is nothing to distract me from the moment;” this has been the great honor of being able to minister among you for so long. I’ve been able to see life two stories high, your life, our lives, a good seat. You’ve let me into your life and what could be better? And like the old man, “I want the moment to last forever.”

But, no. This kind of sermon might have become a bit too maudlin, too emotional, too hard on everybody. I hope you know I love you very much and every sermon I’ve preached from this pulpit has intended to convey that, that you are loved, that you are held. So, we’ll leave that for now. One more scrap in my June 5 folder we’ll set aside.

You’ve heard Buechner in the reading. (Boy, when I leave off preaching regularly, the word count of his name in Google is going to plummet!) Here, on other sheet of paper is a fragment of a poem by Mary Oliver. They are the sum and substance of my preaching, particularly in these later years. “Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” Twelve words. I could have just read them and sat down. It would have been enough.

My June 5th folder is almost empty. One more piece of paper with my writing, scribbled in the dark of night, a thought I had while I was awake. You have heard me say this year that the single most common question you have been asking me, by a long shot, is “What are you going to do?” I have tried everything to satisfy you. I share a retirement day with Ellen Goodman who simply answered, “Less!” I tried that. You pushed it aside. So all year I stammered, “Teach. Write. Travel. Walk. Play. Unpack. Read. Nap. Leave the company and go to bed.”

And then I thought to myself: wait a minute! It’s not so much what am I going to do? What are YOU going to do? What are you going to do, First Parish? We’ve had a great run here. We’ve done amazing things. We’ve expanded, numerically, architecturally, institutionally, spiritually, musically, and educationally. We’ve empowered young and old to go out into the world to make a difference. We’ve raised a lot of money and we’ve given a lot of money away.

We’ve given our young people a faith and a voice. We’ve had a great run, you and me. What are you going to do now? Please keep running. Get right behind our new interim, Elaine, and behind Jenny and all the staff. Say yes. Stay involved. Get involved. Give generously. (Give generously now!) Dream new dreams. Make a difference in this town, in this area, in this world. What are YOU going to do, First Parish? Ask each other this question. Find new energy.

Do you remember the children’s game, played on the ice [is it called “Crack the Whip?”], where a line forms and begins to move out from one stationary person, out on the line as the person on the end goes faster and faster. That is who we are in these days, we, the members and friends of the First Parish in Concord, Massachusetts. We take turns being the stationary one, the grounded one, and the rest of us scramble out onto the line, and we are carried out farther and farther, faster and faster, ready to be propelled out into the world, first you, and now me, one minister in a long line of ministers, this is a congregation always in motion.

I find it remarkable, as I look out at you on this June Sunday morning that the life of this community has never been broken. Someone here right now

Gave generously two or three years ago to renovate our religious education wing and knew somebody who was a member here in 1956, when this congregation made a commitment to our children and added the original wing on the eastern end of the building, who

knew somebody who was a member here when this building burned in 1900, who

knew somebody who was a member here when John Brown came to Concord to fight for the abolition of slavery, who

knew somebody who was a member here when this church split in 1825 and some of our beloved members founded the Trinitarian Congregational Church across the Milldam, who

knew somebody who was a member here when the Minutemen rallied in 1775 at the old North Bridge, who

knew somebody who was a member here in the 1720’s when parishioners committed to putting up a building that looked much like this one, who

knew somebody who was a member here in the late 1600’s during King Philip’s War, who probably

knew Peter Bulkeley or Simon Willard, two of the very first, with their families, who gathered this parish in what was called Musketaquid, where two rivers meet, in 1635, and gathered this church a year later, July of 1636.

The line has never been broken. This congregation never was totally wiped out or started over. Many of the first families carried on and on, and then new families arrived, and generations of those families endured, and so on, up until the present day. We are not some splendid isolated group of people, arriving here for the first time today, somehow set aside from all these people who came before, claiming some exclusive ownership of the place, here for ourselves alone. We are inheritors of a rich past, but we have something to pass on to the future, too. It is likely that many of the children here, swarming around us in the aisles and in the coffee hour, will be bringing their own children here, years and years from now, and your grandchildren, real and imagined, will be here, too.

We are more than ourselves alone. We are that last person to walk through the door and say this is the religious community for them. And today, of course, we are at a crossroad. We are on the threshold of something. We are saying good-bye and then you will turn to say hello to Elaine. Big step. Not easy.

But the professional and lay leaders that made up this congregation in the past were not those who stepped away from a challenge, they were not weak voices over in the corner, they were bold people who from these front steps played a major part in American intellectual and political and religious history. And I am thinking of those eleven families in 1635 who made a decision to leave their own comfort and start something here on the Concord and Assabet. And I am thinking of the patriots who marched right by here on Lexington Road in 1775. And I am thinking of those here in 1825 who helped give birth to Unitarianism in America and to those in 1860 who spoke out against slavery and those here in 1900 who saw their building in smolders and rebuilt this building on a foundation of New England granite.

We are more than ourselves alone. We are the living embodiment of these very same brave souls I have described whose hands now reach across the generations to us and urge us on, and ask us, “What will YOU do, the current members of First Parish?” What will it take to lift up a new vision, Bill Sinkford asks. “It will take,” he answers, “it will take offering newcomers a religious community that will serve as an antidote to the fear and isolation, the longing for community and intimacy, that brought them through our doors. Our communities must feed their spirits,” Bill says, “and help them grow. It will take…sharing our faith. It will take being clear about what commands our love and our loyalty, and being able to articulate our faith to others… It will take leadership that is willing to claim the good news, that is willing to speak and act consistently out of our values and our vision.

“It will take leaders who can be builders of bridges and crafters of coalitions who can… achieve what we otherwise could not. It will take leaders who are willing to risk genuine engagement with others in our congregations and in the public square…” We are more than ourselves alone. We are entrusted with something bigger than we are, reaching back to our past, leaning out into our future.

On Sunday, March 6, 1988, I preached in the morning and you called me as your Senior Minister in the afternoon. These are the last few words of that sermon, as true now as they were then: “First Parish in Concord,” I said then, “from its beginnings a church always in motion, a church standing proudly within our wider movement and tradition, a church committed to and struggling with a faithfulness to the truth, a church with an eye and a heart and a passion for the future. We stand on the brink of time, you and I, between our yesterdays and our tomorrows, arm in arm with generations past, but as faithful as ever to a vision leading us ‘forth to the future with no doubting spirit.’ The road goes ever on and on.” We have walked this road together for so long, you and I, and I am so proud to have been in your company.

Good-bye. God be with you.