The Last Sermon

On the last of about a thousand Sunday mornings.

Today I am officially retired from parish ministry. As most of us know, “retirement” doesn’t mean what it used to mean. There are no cruises or barcaloungers in my future. I’m keeping busy with Hope and Bread as well as a writing project, bits and pieces of which I may have the courage to excerpt here one of these days. In the meantime, it’s been too long so I thought I’d offer a few words. Like, a subset of the words I preached at Saint Aidan’s by way of a farewell. Mostly, I am full of hope and gratitude.

Of course my last sermon fell on Trinity Sunday, that odd celebration of a doctrine that always falls near the end of the school year and is always full of other things: youth sermons, Sunday school teacher gifts, high school graduations, choir celebrations, or last minute blessings of this or that before everyone takes off for the summer. It seemed fitting nonetheless.

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The creation story on Trinity Sunday reminds us of the holiness of all of creation—we honor God’s creation here at St. Aidan’s in our beautiful grounds, of course, and in our care for all creatures. I will miss the gardens, the sacred burial places, and the bunnies, especially the bunnies. As you steward these spaces, remember that God is present in all of creation, not just in nature. Or, that all is nature, whether it is transitional housing or a community garden or an after-school program or a hygiene center or a food pantry.

The Trinity as theological doctrine evolved in the early centuries of the Church as a way of explaining the divinity of Jesus. Statements of faith like the Nicene Creed and phrases like “begotten, not made” took years—centuries—to be worked out by more theologically eager minds than mine. What I always like to say about the Trinity is that what it means to have a three-person God is that our God is a relationship, and we are invited in.

Priest-blogger Alison Burns LaGreca writes this about the Trinity, and it might be one of my favorite things on the subject:

It’s not a math problem about persons and substance, or divine algebra, but something more elemental. The God who breathes over the formless deep in Genesis, the Christ who gathers doubters on a mountain in Matthew, the Spirit who bends through history the way the wind bends trees, this is a god whose very nature is movement toward the other. Relationship as origin. Love as structure.

If our God-who-is-a-relationship holds all things, God holds the comings and goings of church goers and church leaders. These comings and goings, which tend to make some of us anxious, are part of life. Beside the Holy One’s eternal changelessness, change is, after all, the only thing we can count on.

Thanks to Jon Tyson for the photo.

Probably those of us who have been part of a church community for a long time have either heard someone say or have ourselves said about a priest: Priests come and go but I was there when they got here and I’ll be here when they leave. (Often this is said when discussing a priest someone doesn’t like. Someone here probably said it about me.) I recently heard a story about a much nicer way to express this. A woman in a large well-resourced sat down with a new rector and said “Young man,”—he was probably 45 or 50— “I’ve been here for 80 years. You’re my seventh priest. I want you to know that I consider you an honored guest.” I love that: honored guest.

What if we all understood that we were honored guests wherever we are: at our jobs, in our families, on our planet, this fragile island home? Perhaps it might be easier to treat each other with tenderness and grace. For myself, I hope that the spaciousness of retirement—at least from this particular slice of the pie—will help me treat all whom I encounter as honored guests.