Ch ch changes

(a message for we who are having a hard time keeping up with it all)

(Sermons are a spoken art form - so much of the meaning comes through in how they are delivered, so if you the the time/ability, I always encourage folks to listen along - starts at 25:20)

Photo by Avrielle Ali on Unsplash

(The readings were the 23rd Psalm and John 9:1-41)

Ch ch changes

About five years ago, when I was doing a lot of yoga—which honestly already feels like a story about a different person—anyhow 5 years ago my left hand started hurting.

At first I ignored it, because that is both my spiritual practice and my medical plan. But when it got worse, I finally went in for an X-ray, thinking maybe I had injured it in some glamorous yoga-related way.

When the doctor came back in and I said, “So, is it sprained?”

“No …but you do have arthritis.”

And I said, “Could there have been some sort of clerical error? I’m pretty sure I’m 32.”

And he was like, “No ma’am. You are for sure 52.”

Which felt rude. But also correct.

And weirdly - that is what I have been thinking about this week. Not just aging, exactly. But change. Namely, the kind we do not choose. The kind that is hard to keep up with. The kind that arrives whether or not we are spiritually mature enough for it.

For instance, the past few weeks here at St. John’s I have found myself getting emotional about Richard no longer being our Dean. I mean, I am trying to be mature about it. Yes, the Episcopalians of Alabama are gaining a great bishop. Good for them. But I kept quietly getting a little teary. Partly because I will miss him. But also because emotionally speaking it can feel like every time I experience a loss, it brings up other losses from the past. Like they are all clustered together inside me.

The loss of a pre-Facebook, rotary-dial world feels like, scotch taped together with the loss of that time when my children were little; which is then somehow also Velcroed to the loss of places I loved—Muddy’s Coffeehouse, the Mercury Café, House for All Sinners and Saints; which is inexplicably attached to the loss of basically everything we learned in civics class.

So if you too feel it’s hard to keep up with all the changes in the world, and in ourselves, and in our bodies, and in our children, and in our churches, just know you’re not alone.

It can feel exhausting, this business of being alive, because life giveth and life taketh away and sometimes we are left breathless trying to catch up to it.

There’s a lot of this sort of thing in our (never-ending) Gospel story today of the man born blind. A big change - and then the inability for him and his parents and his community to keep up with that change.

Most of us may never experience something as dramatic as being born blind and then having some prophet, in a what could only be described as a breathtaking OSHA violation, spit in the dirt, rub mud on our eyes, and then suddenly we can see for the first time in our lives.

But maybe all of us have a bright line in our lives—an accomplishment, a diagnosis, a death, a birth, a great love, a great loss—from which there will always be a before and an after. Who we were the day before our sibling died, or the day before our grandchild was born, or the day before we went to rehab or the day before we came out of the closet, will never exactly match who were the day after.

It’s hard to imagine what it was like for the man born blind to wake up in a world suddenly flooded with faces and light and color and distance.

I’ve had a hard enough time incorporating being someone with arthritis into my own self-understanding. How in the world did the man born blind adjust to being a person who could now see?

Thinking about him this week, I found myself hoping, with real tenderness, that he did not go back to begging just because it was familiar.

In the early 90s when I got sober I very much needed to get clean but the idea of becoming someone else terrified me, so I tried desperately to live the exact same life, in the same places and with the same people just without the drugs and alcohol. Because when change feels scary, familiarity can feel like safety, even when it’s not. But trying to just impersonate a previous version of myself ends up being more painful than just accepting that I’ve changed.

I mean, remember when things opened up after COVID – how awkward those first interactions with friends and family felt after having all been stuck at home for so long. How unfair it felt to expect the world and ourselves and our friends to be unchanged after something as big as surviving a global pandemic?

Well, when Jesus opened the eyes of the blind man, it threw that guy’s life into chaos. This was not a change his community delt with graciously. The very people who should have been rejoicing with him reject him instead, and our text says that when Jesus heard that had happened, our Lord went and found him.

Jesus went and found him.

I love that.

This man is never named in the story, which is irritating to me, (I mean there’s like 2,000 words in this reading – not one of them could have been devoted to giving him a name?) so I like to imagine that Jesus did not greet him saying, “Hey, guy born blind” which is who he was to everyone else.
I like to imagine Jesus called him by his name. And that the man turned at the sound of it.

Which of course brings me to Mary Magdalene.

Mary

Every single year at the Easter Vigil, when John 20 is read, I get choked up at a very particular point.

It’s that moment when Mary is standing outside the tomb weeping saying “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.”

Now, I do not know what it was like to be a woman in the first century from whom 7 demons had been cast out, but I do know what it is like to be saved from self-destruction, and how difficult it is to adjust to the changes that comes with it, and I know how no matter what, even after 34 years of sobriety, to some people I will always be that messy drunk girl.

Which is why I have often thought that maybe part of Mary’s grief was that to everybody else she was always “that crazy lady”. But to Jesus, she was Mary. Just Mary. And each time Jesus called her by her name, it felt like a complete sentence.

I imagine that over the years, in the company of Jesus she had grown used to being seen as a whole person. And now he was gone, and maybe part of her grief was wondering whether anyone would ever see her that way again.

But then, as she stood weeping Jesus says, “Mary.” And she turns.

Not at the sound of “hey aren’t you that crazy lady?” She turns at the sound of her name spoken by the one who knew her completely through every iteration of her life.

Maybe that is what salvation feels like sometimes. Just hearing your name spoken in love.

So, friends, there will still be times when we find ourselves wishing we could return to an earlier version of our lives. Or an earlier version of the world. Or an earlier version of our church.

But the God who meets us in Jesus is not in love with some archived edition of us. I guess what I mean is that even as our lives keep changing beyond our ability to keep up, God continues to know us in love.

I know there’s that cutesy saying that the only constant in life is change, But there is a deeper constant in this world which is a God who changest not- who is always calling us by name with that still, small voice that tells us who we are. A God in whose presence we can totally relax, from whose heart flows such generosity that we are defenseless against it.

So no matter what change comes, there’s just no need to ever impersonate a previous version of ourselves, and given the changes at St John’s, it may be worth saying as we move forward here, that there is also no need for us to ever impersonate a previous version of this cathedral.

Because the God who has been faithful to us in every past iteration of who we were follows us into every future iteration of who we are becoming. Not protecting us from change, but always, always, sustaining us through it¹.

In closing, I want to say that I don’t know how many times in my life I have heard and read and spoken the 23^rd Psalm, but this week as I wrote this sermon, something totally new stood out for me – which is the word ALL.

Surely God’s goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.

All the days.

Not only the good old days.

All the days.

From the day we drew our first breath
to the day we got caught stealing that candy bar.

From the day we met our first true friend or fell in love, or finally stopped drinking… to the day the oncologist called, or our child died.

From the day we could not stop crying, to the day we finally appreciated birdwatching.
All the days of our lives

Right up to the day God will lovingly call us by name

one last time.

Amen.

1. This is a adapted from a Father Gregory Boyle quote I heard in a 12 step meeting this week: “God protects me from nothing; and sustains me in everything”