In Unbroken Line: A Sermon in Celebration of the 375th Anniversary of First Parish in Concord
- Details
- Created on Sunday, 23 October 2011 01:00
- Written by Jenny M. Rankin
It was January, the day was cold and windy, and the sky spoke of snow. The woman walked down Lexington Road to church. Usually, her mother-in-law and children came too, but they were at home nursing colds, and so Lidian came alone. January was a difficult month for her. Church was a place she could sit and think, just be with herself for a time.
How many years ago had it been, she wondered, that soft May morning when she and Mr. Emerson had walked just this way holding the baby in their arms for the christening. He was dressed in the white christening dress that Mr. Emerson’s brother, Charles had worn 27 years before, Charles who had been dead just about a year. Lidian knew her husband was thinking of his dear dead brother as they walked in the spring sunshine to church.
In the sanctuary, Grandfather Ezra Ripley had taken the baby in his arms. He was 86 years old but still a towering figure as he stood there and began the words of the service. How could they have known they would have been back in the same place six years later, this time for the funeral of their son.
It was years ago now but January was still difficult. Lidian Emerson glanced up at the grey sky, listened to the church bell tolling, and walked through the front doors at 20 Lexington Road.
For me, as I have spent the past few months preparing for this 375th anniversary, the story of this community over time has become a kind of fascination. Ok, I admit it, maybe, an obsession!
I don’t know when it was that I realized this was happening. Was it on a trip to the Houghton Library in Cambridge when I held our oldest record book in my hands?
Or at the Concord library as I leafed the Women’s Parish Association files, read about the first Sunday School, found Ellen Emerson’s music collection? Learned the story of Louisa May Alcott arranging lilies-of-the-valley in vases that she put in the windows of the church for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s funeral? Or read what Grindall Reynolds wrote about was like to be a minister at this church during the days of the Civil War--seeing the Concord soldiers off at the train station on April 19, 1861, just a few days after the firing on Fort Sumter. These men who were husbands and brothers and sons of this church, of this town--and then doing the funerals of those who came back home in a wooden box.
No, I realize, my fascination didn’t start in any of those places. It began right here. Right here in this room with you.
You who come here now,
Who bring your kids,
Who come alone,
Who slip into a back pew now and then, Or are here week after week.
Who have been here for 50 years of Sundays or just started coming last month.
When you walk in those doors, I watch your faces. I remember your stories or the bits of your stories you have told me, that I have been honored to learn.
When I touch those yellowed pages, I know I can’t ever know those men and women, who lived so long ago, but I know you or some of you
When I see those names in the book, I think of them as another version of you, another version of this community at another point in time. I know there is an awful lot that is different. Electricity. Cars. Cell phones. Airplanes. Theology. Dogs in church!
I know that. And I also have to think there is an awful lot that is the same. That is human. Universal.
To me, they aren’t just old tattered brown books with names you can barely make out.
They are people, like you and me,
With lives that we try to live and challenges we face and people we love, so very much.
They are people like us with life stories,
Chapters that ebb and flow,
Seasons of the soul that flow fresh and free
Seasons when we are dry and parched.
When I think about “the story of First Parish” over 375 years, I realize there are 3 angles of view for me:
The institution. That would be the list of ministers, standing committees, by-laws, building renovations, pledge drives. And if this seems dry, when I think of how hard I’ve watched you working at all these things, just to make sure this institution is still standing here, so that someone can come along and slip into the back pew on a Sunday, to me, it is not dry at all.
What is the meaning of this place to the wider world? From the beginning, of course, First Parish has been engaged with the wider world. What does it mean to be a church that has had literally a front seat on two revolutions? First, a political revolution, the American Revolution and then the cultural revolution, what F. A. O. Mathiessen once called the American Renaissance, the beginning of a distinctly American art, literature, spirituality, culture. This rendition of the story has famous names in it. People who have been in our meetinghouse, who have spoken from this pulpit. William Emerson, John Hancock, Sam Adams, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry James, President Ulysses S. Grant, William James. The list could go on and on.
The inner life of the women and men who have come here. This story is more hidden. Mysterious. It is the spiritual biography of our community, if you will.
It is the story of ache and hope, of striving and suffering. It is the story of what it means to be human, to love, to lose, to try, to fail, to try again.
This is the story of the ones who were not famous. Whose names we can read in faded flowering handwriting but whose stories we cannot know.
They came here, they raised their children, they got married, they buried their dead. Ordinary, perhaps, and yet not so ordinary.
They were people kind of like us, I would wager. Trying to do the right thing, stay hopeful, hold onto what is good even in the face of reversals, discouragement, pettiness. There’s a lot we can never know about their inner stories but I think what we have in common with them is this:
They brought their hearts here. And so do we. Week after week,
We bring our hearts and all that is in them. We bring the people we love
Whether they are here or in some other place We bring what we love,
What we cherish,
All we have vowed to protect and honor
We bring it with us and it is sometimes here, in the quiet of a pew, that we reckon with our own knowledge that we aren’t always able to keep the people we love safe or well.
That in the face of the forces of the world or the human psyche, in the face of addiction or mental illness or illness, we can’t always keep them safe from suffering or ourselves safe from suffering,
But still we are here, loving them, praying for them, hoping for them, believing in them.
“Sometimes,” writes the poet Wendell Berry, “when despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night . . . . I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water.....For a time I rest in the grace of the world and am free.”
Yes. We go to the edge of the ocean.
To the heart of the forest
We go up mountain path or beside still water.
We find the sacred in nature as did our Transcendentalist forebears. AND we come here.
And bring our hearts.
Yes, so much has changed.
But I have to think some of the fundamental things remain the same.
Our desire to love and be loved
Our need to find meaning in a world that can be big and sometimes overwhelming, chaotic, random, violent
Our desire to be of use, to matter, to mean something.
Our desire to get closer to mystery, to ultimate things however we name them.
We are human beings, and
There is something in us that wants to take off our shoes and step onto holy ground.
So much has changed and so much remains the same.
What I believe is that when we come here whether it is for 1 Sunday or for 50 years of Sundays,
When we come we bring our unique spirit—whatever it is that makes you “you” or me “me”
We bring our soul
We bring our mind, our heart, and a little of that stays and becomes part of the fabric of this place.
Maybe we can’t see that with our eyes or touch it with our fingers.
Our Transcendentalist ancestors reassure us that’s OK. It is still real. Like courage is real though you can’t touch it and love is real though you can’t see it with your eyes.
A bit of you is here. And you and you and you, and women we cannot see and men we will never know.
And so now, we touch not just one another but all of the others spirits and souls who have come here.
They are gone but there is a bit of them that is here, their strength, their sadness, their sorrow, their selves here
Think of what an amazing well of humanity we dip into
Think of what a deep well of human suffering and strength and gratitude and resilience we dip into
It is here for us
Some days we remember, some days we don’t
But it is here
It is always here for us.
That is the living tradition in which we live and move and have our being.
It is that we give thanks for in this 375th year of our being together.
“Forward through the ages,” we sang a few moments ago, that hymn that so often makes me cry. “Forward through the ages, in unbroken line.”
Unbroken line. Imagine!
The miracle of that unbroken line
Sure, the line has wavered now and then, it has gotten smudged, it has gotten weak, it has gotten worn,
But from 1636 down until today, that line of women and men and children has not been broken.
That line of people who have brought their hearts here, just as we do, Laid them down
And just rested for a little while in the grace of the world
And been free.
Lidian sat in the sanctuary for another minute and looked out the window. She could see the snow coming down. “The snowstorm was real,” she remembered her husband saying, “The preacher merely spectral.” But this Sunday, the preacher had not been spectral. He had said those words she loved from St. John of Chrysostom. “They whom we love and lose are no longer where they were before. They are now....wherever we are.”
The church service was over. Lidian stood and sang the last hymn. It was one of her favorites. She put on her bonnet, pulled her cloak around her and picked up her gloves. It was time to head home. She knew the baby would be asking for her and Ellen would want to walk in the new snow. Mr. Emerson would be writing in his study, waiting for her to come home. They would have dinner, and then, as was their Sunday custom, a family walk as the afternoon deepened into twilight.
Lidian walked up the church aisle. Three of her children would be waiting, she knew. Her fourth child, little Waldo, would not be there. He was now, Lidian thought, wherever I am. She walked through the great doors on Lexington Road, out into the falling snow. Lidian Emerson headed home.