Rev. R. Arrington Chambliss

So that they may be one, as we are one. (John 17:11)

I cannot stop working. In the last two weeks I am either cleaning my house or last weekend, when I did not have to preach, even arranging books in my basement. I have observed that I really cannot stop. I am trying to make ends meet and trying to make sure everything is taken care of before I leave on May 22nd. I sit down for a minute to rest at home and then in the next moment the computer is in my lap and I am sending off another email, checking my list in my little orange book that I call "my brain" or making a call or text message. There are probably a few of you who are witnesses to this: you have received 45 emails from me in your box Saturday morning at 6am. And when I am not in hyperdrive, I turn on the TV--and I don't really watch TV.

When I get in this hyperdrive mode, I usually know something is up. I am hanging out on the circumference of my life to avoid the center or essence or what God is trying to whisper in my heart. I am trying to distance myself from the ache right here in the center - that my spiritual teachers have called "the grief point."

One of my favorite theologians, Richard Rohr says, "We are a circumference people, with little access to the center or our soul."¹ He says, the great spiritual teachers try to teach us is that if we hang out on the circumference--claiming the superficial, just our work, or what we own as substance--of our life--we will never know ourselves or God. Do any of you know this? When I get this busied, I usually am trying to distract myself from what sits smack in the middle of my heart.

I have to say goodbye to you and I don't really want to. Don't get me wrong… I know that I am called to the next phase of my life . . . but darn it . . . I want to take every one of you with me.

I have always been reluctant to say goodbye… I did not pack up my dolls until I was 13 years old and when I did, I bathed every one of them as gently as they were real babies, and washed and ironed their dresses, and then lined them up comfortably in my closet on a blanket. I wasn't really retiring them; they were just settling in for a long nap. I have told you that I can be at airports and watch a couple saying goodbye and have tears streaming down my face. It does not take much.

A "circumference people" try to find all means and substances and distractions to avoid facing the reality of their own lives and in the world. So . . . we make excuses for an abusive relationship and then eat a bag of double-stuff Oreos; tell ourselves that there is nothing we can do about a war that costs $720 million a day and then turn off the radio; try to control our children lives when the truth is we are disappointed in our own; tell ourselves that another drink won't hurt, it will just take the edge off; or turn off the radio when hear that the, rapidly escalating crisis of food availability around the world has reached emergency proportions.

The impact of the denial is that we move further and further away from ourselves and further and further away from God.

When I was in South Africa in 1999 for the Parliament of World Religions, I attended a meditation session with a beloved Rabbi that had lived in Capetown through the rise and fall of Apartheid--the legislated separation of blacks and whites. He led us in meditation on forgiveness. He asked us to get still and move inward and asked what we needed forgiveness for. After the meditation, a member of his congregation, an older, white woman, said, "I don't get it. What do you mean by move inward?" He must have had trusting relationship because he asked her, can I use you as an example? He explained that many of the older white people who had lived through this time--who had so learned to ignore the evil system--and had not done anything because they feared punishment. And in having to deny what they knew in their hearts was not right and was right smack in front of their eyes and in the air breathed. To coexist with this reality, they had had to cut off to a part of themselves. He said, they had lost their ability to drop into themselves because when you have to compartmentalize like this for so long--breathing the evil of this system and daily ignoring another's humanity--it impacts you, it scars you and separates you from your center.

Christian spirituality is "reality felt and not denied, suffered and enjoyed"²--and this slowly--one step forward, two steps back--leads us back to the center. We cannot think our way into the center. The center finds us through suffering, prayer and love. As we sip in little by little reality--the truth of our lives and pray with it--we begin to find our way home to the center or God. "Listen to you life, listen to what happens to you because it is through what happens to you that God speaks. It is a language that is hard to decipher but its there powerfully, memorably, unforgettably.³(Frederick Buechner) But we need to be willing to stop and observe and open our ears and hearts to the language God is speaking.

When I cannot stop working, the alarm goes off in my head that God's trying to whisper something to me and the noise outside is turned way up. Rohr says that "The path of prayer and love and the path of suffering seem to be the two Great Paths of transformation. Suffering seems to get our attention; love and prayer seem to get our heart and our passion."⁴

So I sat down to pray, and the gerbils were off, running on their 10 tiny wheels in my mind--fueling the impulse to jump up, get the laundry, write a letter to Don Kingston for his beautiful gift, answer the phone, work on my sermon. I did not want to sit still. I did not want to pray. Then the fog of numbness and doubt . . . so the more I sat; the more agitated. So I thought I cannot do this without a focal point - so I got the Church Director and I fixed my mind's eye on the picture of St. A's and on you. And as I softened, I began to realize: I cannot imagine not driving up 1A North; and Ellie Mae is going to miss Alan, Anne, and Beatrice and really anyone with a treat; and there are so many treats. And that I love my office. And I want to see Will Tessmer in Confirmation. And I want to hear my Bible study stories of finding God in the death of a beloved friend, in Aunt Mary or the healing from divorce.

It is hard to say goodbye and to loosen the grip on all these dreams unrealized, stories unheard--and instead bear witness to what is: to how much of God I have found at St. Andrew's and in each of you. Bearing witness to your stories that has inspired. To your acceptance of me that has humbled me. To your courage to face into illness that has emboldened me. I have learned to be a priest from you. And as I faced "what is" in my sitting, it begin to give thanks. To feel the deep gratitude I have for each of you and for this place. I could see the parts and the whole--it gave me a glimpse of all our different life-threads woven into this larger fabric--our sacred Christian story that follows God's grand design or pattern for the universe--life, death and new life.

Goodbyes and facing into the end of things is a doorway to help us experience God's grace in our lives.

This week's readings give us two final words or goodbyes from Jesus, one from John's Gospel as Jesus prepares to go to his death and another from Acts as he prepares to ascend into heaven. This is his last opportunity to say what needs to be heard and remembered by his disciples, and Jesus' attention centers unity with God and him and our witness to God's presence in our lives.

In John's Gospel Jesus prayed to his Abba God, begged the creator and sustainer of the world to protect his disciples when he left, to woven or knit together, so that they might be one. It is a beautiful prayer, and a beautiful intention. Churches invoke it as we broker disagreements and establish doctrinal alignment. While I know Jesus would rejoice if his followers prayed the same prayers, and were united as a church under one roof, I doubt that was his chief concern." I have to believe Jesus wanted their lives to be woven together. He wanted them to be one. To live at the center of their lives and reality so that suffering anywhere would affect people everywhere. I think what Jesus would want is to drop into that reality…And then to recognize that God's presence is in the bearing witness to the oneness. So that when one begins attending a 12-step meeting, it sends healing ripples throughout the whole community; So that when at Marblehead BANA Fellow builds a relationship with a young person from the Dominican Republic in the Point Neighborhood that we start having a more substantial relationship with the Point; So that a rip in the human fabric in Kenya creates a tear in your life in America. This is what it means to be one. To open our hearts and lives, to allow ourselves to be changed by the realities of our lives and the world--by facing the reality of the suffering and joys of our lives and the lives of the other, beside us and beyond us.

And goodbyes are one way in. They are an opening to the center or ground of our being, where we find God speaking to us--God dwelling in us; and we in God.

All mine are yours and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them. And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one. John 17:10-11

Amen.