To watch the service that includes this sermon, click here.
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“Jesus said to them, ‘Come away to a deserted place by yourselves and rest a while.’ For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat.”
Grace Church feels full right now.
We are full of activities. We are reopening. We are starting new faith formation projects, including a new group for women, and more for people of all ages in the fall. (And the fall approaches!) Our men’s group is meeting in person soon. We are hosting a play produced by our own Olivia Vessenes. There are several memorial services coming up. I officiated a wedding a couple days ago, and took a call about another one as I was on the way there. People are coming to church to clean, organize things, tend the gardens, fill our space with life again.
But we also are full of feelings.
The word “transition” gets used a lot these days, and it inspires deep feelings. The re-opening is also a tender topic, close to many of our hearts, inspiring relief and excitement, but also grief and anxiety. And many, many of us are facing personal issues, life transitions, scary diagnoses, and all the things that attend every human life. And all this is happening during an era of immense change and turmoil around the globe.
So yes, Grace Church feels full right now. Full of activities, and full of feelings.
Here are some of my feelings.
I am going to miss Wren. A lot. I deeply like her. I respect her, yes, but my feelings for her run deeper than that. She is funny. She is sensitive. She is smart. I love to make her laugh. Around Easter time I experimented with teasing her a little. I did an impression of her steady, calm manner in our liturgies and in her welcoming of us each Sunday. She has delightful sons, and everyone knows that delightful children usually have a delightful parent. I am going to miss her. A lot.
When she told the vestry her news, I remember saying things that were sermon-ready, the kinds of things priests say. I talked about how Wren is giving us this news as a mother, a priest, a pastor, and a friend. I said some other things, perfectly nice but ... forgettable things.
Then one of the vestry members said, “I want to know how Stephen feels.” This is fair! We are a spiritual community, and we should be good at sharing feelings. So I reflected for a moment, and I said, “I feel a kind of sweet sadness. I feel a hole in my heart. I come to work as a friend; friendship is how I enter the workplace. We’re all professionals, but this transition creates friend grief for me.” That’s most of what I said. Now, I have many friends, and so I know that friend grief is just how friendship works. We are mortal, temporal beings. We have complicated lives in a complicated world. I caused friend grief when I moved back to Seattle over a year ago, saying goodbye to many friends. None of them said I should stay for them, or for our friendship. And why would they? They were all moving on, too. That’s how life works. Whenever we love, we feel grief. It’s part of the loveliness of friendship. It’s what Jesus and his friends felt. It’s just how it goes.
And so as I said, Grace Church is full of feelings right now, good, understandable, human feelings. We are feeling grief, yes, and gratitude, for Wren and for her children, for their good and right choice to move forward into a new community, for all that they are and all they have contributed to our community here.
We have other feelings too. We feel sadness, yes, and maybe some other difficult feelings that are painful and hard to really know what to do with. We love Wren, and we love Grace Church, and we love what we have been, and what we have done together, in the years gone by. Our many feelings, tender and hard alike, are a sign that Wren’s time here is holy, it is good. These three years are precious in God’s sight.
And finally maybe some of us feel plain old fatigue, just thinking about some of what lies ahead.
I want to give you authentic encouragement as we recognize and work with all these feelings, during a time at Grace Church when people “are coming and going, and we have no leisure even to eat.”
When I turn to our book of Good News, I see true messages of encouragement. Let me share some of them with you.
First, Jesus is here. In the beginning and at the end, through all of our busy days and big feelings, in all of this, Jesus is here. He invites his disciples, and us, to come away and rest a while. He responds with compassion to the many, many needs of all people, yet he also knows well the human need for rest, and he bids us to take that rest.
And so I encourage you: rest. In this time that can feel feverish, when everything seems to be happening, take time in your spiritual life to go to a quiet place and rest a while. We can afford this rest. In fact we can’t afford not to do it. We are invited by Jesus himself to cultivate a healthy spiritual practice of work, rest, and play. Grace is here, and God is here, and God is our shepherd, and we shall not be in want. All will be well. Rest.
And second, I invite you to hear the writer of Ephesians when they tell us that Christ is our peace. Hear this good news: “In [Christ] the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.” [read twice] Christ our peace joins us all together, and we grow into God’s holy temple—all of us: people who have always known this spiritual tradition, and people who are brand new to it; people who have always loved the Church, and people who have been harmed or damaged by it; people who built Grace from the beginning, and people who are visiting today for the first time. Christ our peace joins us all together, and here we grow. Here, through Christ our peace, we become a dwelling place for God. All is well. Peace.
We will soon say goodbye to our priest and our sibling in Christ, Wren Blessing. Friends do this; it is part of every human story of love. Through all the intensity of this time, resting in the peace of Christ, we will know that wherever Wren is, and wherever all of us are, no matter how near or how far, we will be held together. We will be God’s dwelling place. And all of the land between us will be holy ground.
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Preached on the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 11B), July 18, 2021, at Grace Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Jeremiah 23:1-6
Psalm 23
Ephesians 2:11-22
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
Photo: Stephen Crippen and Wren Blessing, taken by Grace parishioner Judy Williams.