2024-10-16
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
October 13, 2024 Hamilton Coe Throckmorton
Hebrews 4:12-16 The Federated Church, UCC
You may have heard that I will be retiring in a couple of weeks. When you mention that you’re retiring, you get lots of suggestions and advice, generally well-meaning, often helpful, and also some of it, confoundingly enough, contradictory. For years, for example, I’ve heard people say, “Don’t retire from. Retire to.” Have a plan, in other words. Don’t go into it without a sense of what you’re going to replace your work with.
On the other hand, a few months ago Mary heard an interview with Franz Welser-Möst, the music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, who has announced that he will be retiring in 2027. When he was asked what he planned to do once he had retired, he said, “You can’t jump and land at the same time.” That perspective has been far more helpful for me than the counsel to retire to something. I’m not retiring to anything. For the moment, I have decided simply to conclude my full-time working life. In two weeks, I will jump. And then I hope to land somewhere fruitful. It’s all a big unknown, and I am opening myself to its mystery.
I confess I’m unsettled about retiring. As have many of you, I’ve spent my entire life in structured settings in which I was expected to adhere to a schedule and meet certain standards. At the age of five, we head off to school. We attend every day for certain hours and we have homework. When we leave school, we start a job, and again we have a schedule and standards and performance goals. Now, I’m not going to have such a structure. And I wonder what I’m going to do with myself.
Not only that, but I have identified myself over these last forty or so years as a minister. It’s what I do, of course. But it’s also who I am. That has its share of challenges, because people project all kinds of things onto ministers. Because ministers are associated with God, not uncommonly, if people are disappointed by their minister or their church, they can really get bent out of shape. Even though I’m more clear than you could possibly imagine that I’m not God, people’s associating of the minister with God means that they can be wildly let down, and sometimes exceedingly angry, when something doesn’t go as they had hoped.
Not only that, but if they’ve had not-so-good experiences with churches or ministers, they jump to the conclusion that I’m cut from the same cloth as whatever bothered them. That happens often enough that I’m sometimes tempted not to mention my vocation to people. A clergy colleague once told me that, if he was sitting on a plane and his seatmate asked him what he did, used to say, “I’m in philosophy.” The negative associations about ministers were significant enough that he just didn’t want to get into it. Plus, if people curse in front of me, they often needlessly apologize, as though they think my tender ears may wilt under the sounds of those ubiquitous words of frustration and fury. There are unquestionably some downsides to having ministry be my identity.
On the other hand, there are huge pluses that go along with having ministry as my identity. I am granted admission to hospital and hospice rooms simply on the basis of my role. People often open up to ministers and talk freely about what’s on their hearts and minds. And while in many quarters, the behavior of ministers has justifiably caused distrust, it is also true that many people still do trust their ministers. It is, for me, an unsurpassed privilege to have that role in people’s lives. I have been so gratified by the trust you’ve placed in me, and I confess I have immense trepidation at the loss of that role with my retirement.
Given that, you might well wonder why I’ve decided to retire. What I’ve realized is that I am ready for a different pace to my life. One of the drawbacks of parish ministry is that we work weekends. So I don’t have much chance to visit family and friends. Mary and I would like to see more of our children and grandchildren—though I’m not entirely sure they want to see more of us! We also have friends we’d like to visit. And Mary and I would like to do some traveling of our own.
That doesn’t entirely undo my trepidation about what the shape of my days will be like in retirement, though. So I’ve been reminding myself as I approach that day that each stage of my life has brought with it unique and previously undreamt-of blessings. Every transition I’ve undergone in my past has yielded new gifts. New schools, new homes, new jobs, new family members—all of it has filled me with gifts I could not possibly have foreseen.
So what makes me fear that this new stage will be entirely arid? Why would I assume that the God who has walked with me through all the ups and downs of my life thus far would suddenly abandon me and leave me without hope and joy? This is why the Bible over and over again recounts the history of the people and God’s presence in it all. The Bible knows that repeating that faith history is such a powerful antidote to fear and anxiety. If the light of God has invariably shined in my life, won’t that light continue to shine? The history of people of faith is that God has come with fresh mercies to make each day new. God has walked with us through our illnesses and given us an unexpected wholeness; through our failures and given us a transforming forgiveness; through our divorces and shown us an unimagined future. We recite these stories of faith—both biblical and personal—to remind us of what we may temporarily have forgotten: that we are never alone, that God walks with us on the journey, that, in the words of today’s scripture passage, “grace and mercy” will come to us again and again and again.
My guess is that grace and mercy have sometimes seemed in short supply for many, if not all, of us. Life’s pain and loss and death can make us feel absolutely bereft. We may well wonder where in the world that grace and mercy have gone. I know it’s true for me. I want to tell you about two episodes in my ministry that have challenged me in exceptionally daunting ways. They both have to do with deaths in the congregations I was serving. The first, as some of you know, happened over twenty years ago. One Sunday morning in my last church, just as I had climbed into the pulpit to begin my sermon, a woman burst into the sanctuary and walked as fast as she could walk all the way to the front pew where her husband was sitting. She grabbed him by the arm and virtually pulled him to the back of the church. As she reached the back door, she began to wail in utter agony.
Nobody in the sanctuary, including me, knew what was going on. She was standing right next to the head usher, who turned to face me, and with a commanding authority, pointed his finger at me and beckoned me to come. I left the pulpit, and when I reached the family, I learned that their nineteen-year-old son had just been electrocuted at college. I have never in my life seen a more crushing and ungodly despair. They were understandably utterly distraught, as though their world had come to an end.
The family and I, along with several others, went downstairs to the church’s lounge where sobs and despair flooded the room. It was as awful as you might imagine. And as they wept and hugged and expressed total disbelief, I remember feeling totally desolate and wondering how in the world I would again see a hint of grace and mercy.
And then, amidst this apparent hopelessness, I remember hearing above us, coming from the sanctuary, the faint sounds of the congregation singing the hymn “Blest Be the Tie That Binds.” I learned later that my colleague, Robin Carden, had led an extremely pared-down communion service and then invited the singing of that hymn. And the congregation sang it holding hands and embracing each other, all while knowing none of the specifics of what had happened to this family.
In her book The Amen Effect, Rabbi Sharon Brous says that when tragedy strikes or a diagnosis is awful or a person’s world is falling apart, our presence and the presence of the community matters. There’s a Jewish tradition, in fact, that by being present to someone else’s pain, we provide 1/60th of their healing. There was nothing the church could do that day to completely undo the sorrow of that grieving family. They were going to continue to be devastated. But the presence of the church could offer, in a figurative sense, 1/60th of their healing.
Several days later, when we gathered for a memorial service for that young man, I stood in the church door and watched the family walking toward the church for the service. They looked absolutely broken, the heaviness of the moment weighing them down like an anvil. What was striking, though, was that when the service had concluded, and they had had the chance to spend time with dearly beloved family and friends, I saw a different look and demeanor in them. They were still devastated, and would grieve, of course, for the rest of their lives. At the same time, though, that worship time of hearing again the promises of God and of gathering with people they loved and who loved them gave to the family 1/60th of their healing.
“There’s nothing trivial,” says Rabbi Brous, “about the promise of alleviating one-sixtieth of a person’s pain.” She has felt it, as have I, “in hospital visits and pastoral counseling sessions, when I can tell that even just the awareness that someone is worried for me lifts away some of the pain. It’s not nothing.” And while we can’t totally remove someone else’s pain, she says, “Each visit, every prayer, every shared meal brings slight relief. Cell by cell, a softening of the suffering. Enough to be felt” (pp. 108-9). Your presence, my presence, our presence can bring the love and hope of God to agonized people. Grace and mercy enough to shift the world and make a palpable difference. That’s what happened to the family of the young man who had been electrocuted. They discovered in people singing for them, in friends gathering with them, in gentle words of care a ray of hope and healing.
As was everyone, I was devastated by the pain of that death. And I witnessed there the power of a community to usher in a measure of grace and mercy. One other death that rocked me to the core ensued after a phone call I received one day from a man who asked me to come to his house. When I arrived, he told me he had been abusing the friends of his children. He told me just how he had done it, and how tormented he was by his abusive ways. Soon after he began his tale, as I took in the seriousness of what he had done, I told him I would have to go to the sheriff and report it. He told me he knew that.
Once he had finished his confession, I went to the sheriff that evening and recounted, in writing, as much of the story as I could remember. And a day or two later, before this man had been taken into custody, I learned that he had died by suicide. I agonized about that death. What had gone so wrong in him that he had succumbed to abusing young, defenseless children? I was haunted both by what he had done and also, somewhat unexpectedly, by the anguish that had led him finally to the violent taking of his own life. And I tried to sense where God’s presence was in it all: had God abandoned him? And what were we to imagine about God’s response to him in his death?
In a book she wrote about her chaplaincy with the state of Maine Warden Service, Kate Braestrup tells a story about a woman named Betsy who dies by suicide in the Maine woods. She has abandoned her toddler son and then taken her own life. It takes several days of looking before the wardens find her body. When they finally do, they call Betsy’s brother Dan to let him know of her death, and he comes to the place where they’ve found her. Dan tells Chaplain Kate that his sister suffered terribly and that she couldn’t ever seem to get her life together. And then, because he’s heard that suicide is the one unforgivable sin, he says haltingly that he assumes it won’t be possible for his sister to have a funeral in the church.
After a few calming breaths, Kate responds. “In lieu of righteous anger, I heard my voice take on the sure and certain cadences of preaching: ‘The game wardens have been walking in the rain all day, walking through the woods in the freezing rain trying to find your sister. They would have walked all day tomorrow, walked in the cold rain the rest of the week, searching for Betsy, so they could bring her home to you. And if there is one thing I am sure of—one thing I am very, very sure of, Dan—it is that God is not less kind, less committed, or less merciful than a Maine game warden.’
“I paused, gazing sternly into his startled eyes. You got that, Brother Dan?
“He was staring back. He didn’t say a word. . . .
“‘So I want you to know today, Dan, that there is no doubt in my mind, no doubt at all about where Betsy is right now. God is holding your sister close to [that] tender, [holy] heart. Betsy is safe, she is forgiven, she is free at last from all her pain.’
“‘Oh,’ Dan breathed. ‘Oh’” (Here If You Need Me, p. 112).
Safe, forgiven, and free: grace and mercy were there for Betsy. And they were there for the man over whom I had agonized. The deep truth of the matter—and this is what I take with me into the fear and uncertainty of my own retirement—is that in life and in death, in joy and in sorrow, in sin and in song, God never leaves our side. God walks with us always. Friends and family and strangers will provide 1/60th of the healing we crave. And we will offer that to each other. And God will follow us all the days of our lives, and embrace us with the fiercest love imaginable. And it will be good. May it always be so.