2024-10-22
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
October 20, 2024 Hamilton Coe Throckmorton
Mark 10:35-45 The Federated Church, UCC
As we approach next week’s end to this chapter of our life together, I reflected last Sunday on some of my mixed feelings about the subject of retirement, and on a couple of the deaths during my ministry that had been especially challenging. This morning, as I did a few weeks ago in reflecting about God, I want to offer another in this series of what we might call faith witnesses, and to reflect some on how I’ve developed and grown over the years of my ministry.
When Daniel Cooperrider preached here a year or two ago, he mentioned that the philosopher and theologian Ralph Waldo Emerson was in the habit of asking people he hadn’t seen in a while, “What has become clear to you since last we met?” This morning, I want to tailor the question slightly for this situation. Since we’ve seen each other, you and I, rather recently, I want to frame the question this way: “What has become clear to you since first we met?” I’ve known a number of you for twenty years, and many others of you for a sizable chunk of time. So the question is: What has become clear to me—and perhaps to you, and to all of us—since we met in 2004 or in subsequent years?
The first thing that’s become clear to me since first we met is just how easy it is for me to make mistakes and to let you and others down. Some of you will need no convincing of that! “I’ll say!” you may well be thinking about my shortcomings. For me, too, though, I am regularly aware of my own failings, on all sorts of fronts. Just when I may think I’ve gotten it, I’ll overlook something or say the wrong thing, and everything falls apart.
Some years ago, I officiated at the wedding of a young couple. Mary and I went to the reception afterwards, and as it came time for us to leave, I went to the bride and told her we’d be heading off. She was eating a piece of her wedding cake, and as I went to hug her, she said, “Wait a second. I need to wipe the sugar and frosting off my face.” And I, beguiled, as I am, by sweet things, and trying, I suppose, to be funny, and obviously without really thinking at all, said “That’s OK. I can lick it off.” Who says that?! And especially what minister says that?!
As I got in the car to leave, I said to Mary, “You’ll never believe what I just said to the bride.” “What?” she asked. I told her and she said, “Oh, no!” There may even have been a hand smacking against a forehead. I couldn’t believe I’d said it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I didn’t sleep at all well that night. Those words spun in me like a horror movie.
That wasn’t the end of the story, though. The next day, I called the bride and told her how deeply sorry I was for what I’d said. What with sexual misconduct and clergy sexual abuse being as prevalent as they are, I told her how mortified I was at my thoughtless and pathetic attempt at humor. To my great relief, she laughed and told me she thought it had been funny. And even though I still deeply regretted my mind-boggling faux pas, her forgiveness lifted an enormous load. The Spirit breathed into me a kind of new life and reminded me I was not the total dimwit I had imagined myself to be in the moment.
Nor is that close to the only time I’ve done something at which I’ve been embarrassed. Years ago, here at Federated, I totally forgot that I was to perform a baptism one Sunday morning. I cannot conceive of how I forgot that, but I did. I was sitting in my seat on the chancel, and in walked the family, baby in baptismal garb in tow. I thought I was going to pass out. Quickly, during a hymn, I got the font out and we performed the baptism. I was aghast, though. And again, just as in the wedding tale, the family was immensely gracious with this numbskull. They never held it against me, and are still very much present here at Federated. I could not be more grateful for their forgiveness. First thing that’s become clear to me over the years: we have a near-bottomless ability to hurt each other. And, at the same time, when we’re open to it, there’s a God-infused capacity for renewal and forgiveness that can restore life even when all seems lost.
So we hurt each other and, by grace, there is the sublime gift of forgiveness. Here’s the next thing that has become clear to me since first we met: I am struck, as I look at my life and at the larger world, by how broken and divided we so often are. This, of course, is a cliché of the first order, yet nonetheless true. Political, religious, and social differences proliferate and scar us with their severity. Families fracture. Church members feud. Neighborhoods splinter. Old friendships disintegrate. Battle lines get drawn. And we think that nothing can possibly turn things around. It can be particularly searing and draining.
In the last church I served, in Barrington, RI, the church at one point called an openly lesbian associate pastor. This was in 1995 or 1996, when tensions on the issue of LGBTQIA+ identity and ministry were at something of a fever pitch. This was a charged time for that congregation.
Not long after this new associate pastor arrived, she and her partner asked if they might have a union service blessing their shared commitment (this was long before the advent of marriage equality). Shortly after I had officiated at this union service, one of my favorite people in the church, a Deacon, a man with whom I had sailed on Narragansett Bay, a person I treasured, came to see me. He told me through gritted teeth that he believed that union service had, in his words, “sullied the sanctuary.” And he told me he would never again set foot in the church. I was utterly heartbroken at his departure, desolate at this fracture.
Several years later, I heard that this man was dying of cancer. Even though he had left the church, I decided to go visit him. With some trepidation, I went to his house, and I knocked at his door, not having any idea whether he would be willing to see me. I figured that his wife would likely be the one to come to the door, but when the door opened, there he stood. And he looked at me. And he threw his arms around my neck. And he put his head on my shoulder. And he sobbed. And together we held on. He died shortly after that. And his daughter said to me, “I think my father knew he was wrong.” Whether that was the case or not, though, that moment was a marvel to me, a reconciliation that was a gift of the highest order. And it showed me that even in an apparently irreconcilable split, it is still possible for a Holy Wind to blow in that cavernous chasm of discord and to bring back to life what had seemed entirely dead. This is the second thing that has become clear to me over these decades—that life can shatter even intimate connections, and that reconciliation can come to even the most fractured of relationships. A God “merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love” (Psalm 103:8) can and does fill us with a new Spirit and restore us to wholeness. Not always, but here and there, and now and then.
So we hurt each other and there’s forgiveness. And we’re divided and there’s reconciliation. The third thing I have been struck by over these decades is the injustice that sometimes seems so relentless. We have all been shattered over the years by the murders of Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and so many others. We’ve been shocked by the murder of Matthew Shepard and the seemingly endless thwarting of so many LGBTQIA+ people. We’ve been numbed by gun violence and an apparently interminable series of mass shootings. We’ve been horrified by the brutality of Hamas on October 7, and by the ferocity of the Israeli response. We’ve watched climate change continue to unravel planetary health. There have been, for me, and I imagine for you, moments of utter despair.
At the same time, though, it has been my privilege here at Federated to be part of a resistance to such violence and viciousness and mayhem. This church has had a longstanding relationship with Mt. Zion United Church of Christ, a predominantly Black congregation, and sponsored numerous book studies and educational sessions on our own unconscious bias and racism. We have witnessed and celebrated gay weddings and the baptisms of their children. We have embraced transgender preachers and celebrated a renaming ceremony for a Federated trans youth. We have shared meals with Muslim and Jewish friends, and learned about each other, and grown together. We have been reminded about the pernicious effects of our resistance to climate change and we’ve been educated about how we might make more of a difference. The third thing that’s become clear to me over the years is that there are entrenched and oppressive systems, and that even these demonic structures can be dismantled piece by piece, and a wondrous beauty can take hold.
The fourth and last thing I’ll mention that I’m acutely aware of over the years—and it’s not unrelated to the injustice I’ve just mentioned—is the personal cruelty that can singe us with its ruthless malice. A partner screams obscenities at their spouse. A parent abuses a child. A business owner crushes a competitor. Some teens gaslight a classmate. In a meeting years ago, a church member, disgusted with my stance on some church matter, screamed at me, “I thought I could outlast you, and I just can’t do it anymore.” The world can be a cruel and callous place.
One day, though, years ago, in a story I’ve told not too long ago, I was leading a graveside service for a man who had just died. A great many people had come to the cemetery. When the committal was over, I talked to some of the attendees at the graveside for a bit, and then I headed down the long row of cars back to where my car was parked. As I walked, up ahead of me I could see that some people were down on the ground working on one of the cars in the line. As I got closer, I could see that three men were busily changing a tire on one of the cars—“oh, what a terrible time to have a flat tire,” I thought. As I got still closer, I could see that the car they were working on was mine—it was my car that had the flat tire. And as I got right up to the car, I saw that the men changing the tire were the three sons of the man we had just buried. Even in their grief, even when they had every excuse in the world not to change that tire—“someone else can do that today”—even with all that, and without a hint whose car it was, they had stopped to change my tire. It was, for me, a moment of simple and stunning grace.
Even with how awful we can be to each other, life still sings with sparkling beauty. The fourth thing that’s become clear to me over these decades is how grateful I am for the spectacular, and often so simple, marvels of the kindness we see in life. When I’m open to it, there’s a kind of mesmerizing radiance to life and I have been gifted beyond belief, often in the most everyday ways. Even with all the hatred and intolerance and abuse and violence and war that plague us—and we dare not minimize those scourges—it is still true that there’s an astonishing beauty, a sublime Spirit, that engulfs us and transforms us, a beauty and Spirit we may see in the simplest acts of human kindness.
So I lift up the work of God that is always remaking the brokenness. And I celebrate what our scripture passage commends today, that we are better, and life is at its fullest, when we enter our whole selves into this holy healing, when we make ministry our North Star and service our byword. Greatness, says Jesus, is measured in ministry. Triumph is measured in service.
My thirty-seven years in the pastorate have been an unimaginable gift. Even though the timing of my retirement feels right, I cannot tell you how much I’m going to miss being with you, and it would be disingenuous of me to soft-pedal that sense of loss in the presence of you whom I treasure. I feel an immense grief as I anticipate leaving here. I am sustained, though, by this deep and abiding sense that you and I live and move and have our being in a rarefied space where grace and love and forgiveness keep remaking the world. We have again and again had our life restored by the God who keeps making all things new (Revelation 21:5). And what gives life its brightest sparkle is when we join in that work of newness-making—when we forgive each other for our errors, when we make peace amidst tension and division, when we pursue justice together with those who have been cast to the side, when we engage in the simple acts of love that remake the world, one piece at a time. This is what has become clear to me since first we met. May God continue to fill us with grace. And may we be servants of that holy love in all we do and are.