|
"This Time and Place"
The Rev. Jan Kwiatkowski
Texts:
Media Player audio |
(Flash video and audio - 44.7 MB) |
Do you remember perhaps back when you were really small what it was like to go into somebody’s house for the very first time? Maybe it was your best friend’s house, you got invited over or maybe it was your teacher’s house, somebody that was special in your life, a house you didn’t normally go. And to go into somebody’s house like that when you are little is really kind of a mystery. Did they have the same stuff that we had? Did they eat the same kind of food? Is the house cleaner or is it messier? What is the house rules? What can I get away with here, what are they going to be really tough on? And when we go to a house like that when we are little we know what houses we want to go back to. We know the houses we feel welcome in and which houses we don’t want to go back to. I know my own kids had Uncle So and So whose house they absolutely loved going to. And then there was Aunt So and So and “Oh gee, do we have to go there again?” Everybody has those kinds of houses and those kinds of experiences. As adults we think we are a little more sophisticated than that when we go into somebody’s house for the first time we look around. We kind of look at the furniture or look at or sometimes I will say “Well thank goodness their house is at least as dirty as mine is.” Because I don’t feel so bad about that. We do this whole little mental comparison but at the same time we all know which homes we are welcome in where we are made to feel comfortable in and which homes we are not. Which homes we want to go back to and which homes we do not. Homes tell us a lot about ourselves and the people who live in those homes. Our homes are very important to us; they are very important symbols to us. And most of us at some point in our lives get to chose our home or at least the space where we live, what that space is going to be like, how we are going to decorate it how we are going to decorate it, how we are going to maintain it, what our priorities are in terms of how we keeping the house up. If you walked into my house and looked at the magnet on the refrigerator that says, “this is a Martha Stewart free zone,” you would get where my priorities in terms of the house are. Homes tell us a lot about people. A lot of stories that we reference in our lives have to do with homes, have to do with houses. We know that every Thanksgiving we go to this home or every Thanksgiving I host a big dinner at my home. Hospitality or whatever it is, family gathering and good food is really important to us. Sometimes we hear a story on the news something happened in a particular home and then the story becomes about the home. That’s the home where whatever it was happened.
Home is something that is consistent in our lives. We probably don’t think about them a lot. What occurred to me about the space that we call home whether it is a dorm room, whether it is an apartment, whether it is a home is that all our homes are transitional. We all live in transitional housing. Because at some point everyone of us will leave our home. Will leave the physical space that is our home. Some of us move to a different space and create a new home but we physically vacate that home. Sometimes life happens to us, we have more kids and we need a bigger home we move or we add on or whatever. As we go through life we may choose to upsize or downsize our home. Depending upon illness and possibly foreclosures, many people are losing their homes now. Job changes. We physically leave our homes. Even if we have a home that has been in the family for generations at some point we leave that space. Some people choose to die in their homes, they have hospice care and they can die with their family around them. But again, we physically leave our homes.
And I was thinking about that in terms of St. Christopher’s and Scott’s leaving and my transition and the words we are all hearing lately. The words particularly of interim and transition and it occurred to me that is what we are in our homes. We are interims in our own homes because eventually we will leave there and somebody, unless the house burns down, or there is some catastrophe, will follow and for most of us unless we have built it, someone has been there before. So we are all interim, we are all transitions in our own home. An interim in transition as well as rector, and bishop, and deployment officer, and cannon to the ordinary, and covenant and vestry and cannons; those are all words that you are going to hear talked about a lot here over the course of the next couple of years because this parish is entering a time of intentional transition. Intentional interim, a time in between a time when people will leave and people will stay. And we don’t often focus on that; we don’t often focus on transition time because we like the idea that things are steady and solid. We like the idea that we own our home and our home is a symbol of stability. But again remember, ultimately we are all going to leave and we’re all in transition from our home.
As we are going through this transition time or just entering it, part of our task is to come to grips with what these words mean for us in this time and place. The vestry and the wardens are seriously engaged right now in looking at , what the word interim means, what does consultant mean? What does the word transition mean? What do all these things mean? But it’s not only their task to do that it’s the whole congregations task to do that. And the vestry will be communicating with you as to what all those words are and how things are progressing but it is important that everybody understand, we are all part of this interim time. Not just Scott, not just myself, and whoever came before and whoever will come after.
I want to read you just a short snippet from a book I received after I was ordained to the deaconate. It’s called Ministry is a High Calling: Aim Low There is a little snippet contained in here entitled “All ministers are interim.” and it’s directed to us clergy to remember you are there for a short time, don’t get your head out of joint thinking what you can do and what you can’t do, what you did well and what you didn’t do well. The part that I am going to read is this – Arriving at a church is a lot like jumping on to a moving train. Leaving a church is a lot like leaving the same train a few miles down the track. Both events can be disorienting and painful. No matter how old your church is it has already gone through more than you will ever know. It will survive you. Meaning us the clergy. Christianity is nearly two thousand years old, your failures will not derail it your successes may even contribute a little to Christianity’s spread. So even as you plan, realize that all ministers are interim and there is a certain peace to recognizing that fact.
And as I thought about that and I played around with the idea of us in our home and us eventually all leaving our homes it occurred to me that as much as the clergy are interim and are transitional no matter if you are here long term or short term we are eventually not going to be here. So is the congregation, the congregation is interim and transitional because there were people here before us. There will be people when we are all gone, whether it is because of death, whether it is because of a job change, whatever it is, there will be people that follow us. We are also constantly in transition.
So I retweaked this part to fit with the congregation. Arriving at or choosing the church is a lot like jumping on a moving train. Leaving a church is like jumping off the same train a few miles down the track. Both events can be disorienting and painful. No matter how old your church, how long you have been there or how short you’ve been there, the church is bigger than you imagine it to be. The whole is bigger than the parts. The church will survive you. Christianity is nearly 2000 years old, your failures will not derail it, your success may even contribute to Christianity’s spread. So even as you plan your time hear realize that the congregation is interim. And there’s a certain peace to recognizing that.
What I reflected on this week is that by virtue of our baptism and by virtue of coming to this table as often as we come to this table we claim our ministry in this place. We claim the ministry and love of God that we will take out to the world but again we are here in this time and place for a short time. We are interim ministers, all of us. And in some ways this is a very freeing thing. All of Christianity does not depend on what we do here. We can discern what it is of God’s will, what it is of God’s whole plan for salvation that St. Christopher’s can do. We may do that well, we may not do that well sometimes. The Christianity is a lot bigger than we are, but there is also something humbling about that because sometimes and any group or parish may think that “we have the claim on Christianity and we’ve got it right and what we do here is so important that if we don’t do it that somehow the church collapses. Now we don’t talk about that arrogance that sometimes we have in the back of our minds.
Our readings give us a big clue as to what the church is to be about. In the Gospel it says, do not let your hearts be troubled believe in me, believe also in me, in my father’s house there are many dwelling places. When I was at St. John’s on the Lake as the chaplain I preached on this reading a lot because it is commonly used for funerals and memorial services and actually this is the first time I have preached on this with everybody who is alive. It’s really kind of nice! But as I was thinking about that and thinking about St. Christopher’s and all of that I was thinking about this house, this physical building that we have here. The vestry, the building committee, Scott, John Hickey, even myself a little bit way back when this first started, the builders did something marvelous, they created this physical house. What this physical house is, this building is a symbol that reminds us who are inside this building and also anyone who passes this building that God dwells amongst God’s people. This building is a symbol that God dwells amongst God’s people. And I though about the Gospel, well that does make sense; there are many houses around, many churches many symbols of God dwelling amongst God’s people. Many mansions.
I reflected back to the second reading where it says, “let yourselves be built into a spiritual house.” A spiritual house, that is very different that the building that we are talking about. The spiritual house has an entirely different purpose and again the reading tells us what that purpose is. You are a chosen people a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s people in order that you might proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness and into You are all God’s holy people. These are not words that are talking about people several thousand years ago. These are people that are put here in this time and place for a reason and that reason is to proclaim the mighty acts of God who called us out of darkness into light, who called us as individuals out of darkness into light and as a congregation out of darkness into light.
A more contemporary way to say that is from an author I read this week, “the purpose of being a church is being of faith whose members draw closer to God and to express that closeness in how they live and how they interact with the world. Sounds simple enough, that is what church is about it is what we are supposed to do. And often we take those types of statements and we talk about making a mission statement “What are we about? What is St. Christopher’s about?” and we go into serving the needs of the world, serving the needs of those around us. And that is an incredibly valid mission statement because that is what at minimum the gospel commands us to do. Serve the needs of the poor and those that are hungry in all kinds of ways.
Most of us who come to the church have our needs met. We don’t need anyone to service our basic needs, we have enough food, we have a home, we have all those things And when we come to church and we have a all our needs met it is common for a congregation to come to church to have their spiritual wants met, instead of their spiritual needs met. The church is not about a spiritual bubble bath, sort of a feel good place where we dip in on Sunday and then go back into the world. The church and St. Christopher’s has to be about transformation, about experiencing darkness and coming together into the light. And about taking that experience of darkness and learning about God’s light and love and then taking that beyond this place and into the world. And what needs to be done today in this time and place in Milwaukee is different than what happened in 1950, it will be different that what happens in the year 2060. Again, we are interim we are called to do something in this time and place.
We are part of that same continuum of Christians for the last two thousand years. The Apostles, the early church, people in medieval times, the reformation, the enlightenment, the modern and now what they call the post-modern times struggled with the exact same things that we do. What is God calling us to be? How do we figure that out? How do we live into that? And we do it the same way they did. We do it by engaging in our baptismal promises in the apostles teaching, fellowship, the breaking of the bread and prayers. We do it with discussion; we do it with fellowship, with service. We do it with forgiveness and reconciliation. Just like people all through time, all those apostles and all those churches for two thousand years were all interim ministers. And we have the benefit of 20/20 hindsight to say they have discerned pretty well. They prayed well, they studied scripture well, they listened well, they did well with the time and place in history that God had given them. They proclaimed light in the middle of darkness. We can also look back on history with perfect 20/20 hindsight and say, “Oh, they didn’t do so well. They didn’t pray well, they didn’t listen and forgive.” And we can go, “Oh that‘s the age that’s the generation, that’s the church that did these wonderful things that created these wonderful things where people know they were welcome.
So I’m wondering, given that we are all interim ministers here. How might we pray well? How might we discern well. How might we figure out what God is asking us to do in this time and place? And I wonder in ten, fifteen, twenty, one hundred years from now what will be the stories that people will tell when they first come into our house. What will be the rules that they immediately know about? What will be the experience they have of being welcome? If they had to complete the sentence “St. Christopher’s was a physical and spiritual house where this happened.” What would the blank be that they had to fill in. We are all interim ministers, called in this time and place to light into a very dark world.
Welcome to interim ministry.
