Today’s reading is from the writings of John Muir.
Many years ago the two of us were introduced to these words by church member Winnie Sayre. Winnie had gathered a collection of poems which supported and sustained her during a tender time.
She included these words by John Muir:
“These beautiful days must enrich all my life.
They do not exist as mere pictures…
but they saturate themselves into every part of the body and live always.”
These beautiful days we share with you will enrich all of our two lives.
They saturate themselves into every part of our bodies and will live with us always.
You are beautiful. The view from here is something.
As the two of us move toward retirement, I want to remember your beautiful faces.
Me too. I want to hold this view in my heart.
Theologian Meister Eckhart prayed “Thank you.” And believed if those were the only two words you ever prayed, it would be enough.
Many times I find that when I express gratitude I say, “Thank you, thank you.” Church member Kay Fairwell’s mother always said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” And though Kay’s mother has died, her influence ripples out. In the weeks ahead, we will have other messages to share. Today we want to say to you, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
30 some years ago I was a member of the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Lincoln, Nebraska. We had had a wonderful student intern minister who now after decades of professional parish ministry is a member here, the Rev. Jay Atkinson. Thirty years ago the Lincoln congregation was ready for a next intern. I served on the intern committee. At our first meeting we formulated our list of expectations of a minister. Our own parish minister, good minister that he was, did not have all the qualities we wanted. This was our chance to have it all. We sent our list to Starr King School for the Ministry, believing our order could be filled and we would be sent our perfect minister.
At Starr King, our list was used, no doubt, to point out to seminarians the unreal expectations of ministry by church members. Ministers, like church members, parents, children, friends, lovers. are not commodities. No matter who you are or what you do you can’t meet everyone’s expectations. You can’t acquire a perfect minister.
Another congregation and their new minister had an all church excursion to get to know one another. They took a boat trip out to an island to picnic. All the members were out at sea when they discovered they’d left the picnic baskets back on shore. The minister said she’d go get them. As she walked across the water, one church member said to another, “Wouldn’t you know we’d get one that couldn’t swim.”
Ministry is a fast course in learning one’s shortcomings, weaknesses, limits. No minister can be everything a congregation wants. No minister can be everything he or she wants to be. Thank you for encouraging our strengths. Thank you for using your strengths in the areas where we are limited. Thank you for all the ways you and we minister together. No one can do all that needs to be done. We become more in the sharing.
Whenever human beings come together in community, there’s joy and connection and also times of conflict, distance, and hurts. Things can get thorny.
Once we lived on M Street in Salt Lake City. I’ve forgotten what I was doing out in the yard, but a rose thorn pierced my finger. I thought I got it out. It healed over, but there was a bump. Years later, a rose thorn appeared out of the bump. With a little pressure it popped out. The rose thorn memory stays with me. How amazing that years later the pain emerges and with a little poking, then the physical thorn is gone, leaving the story. I carry scars of life’s lessons, even when the actual affliction has healed. That’s what it means to be human, to live through the pain, carry the scars, remember the lesson and live in gratitude for the journey.
You never know the impact of what you do or say. I guess that’s a good lesson of life and of ministry. Sermons, prayers, who are they for? What impact do they have? Helpful? Harmful? Or just blah, blah, blah, same old, same old…
I preach to myself. I pray for myself, hopefully tuned into a larger perspective. Yet, to be true, the sermon speaks out of my experience and reality; the prayer opens to compassion and presence that I may honor the relationship between what I know within and perceive without.
Sometimes I’m conflict avoidance. I don’t really like the fray. And I’ve learned that when I can lean into another’s perspective, asking for clarity, I begin to see a wider vision.
Thank you for speaking out of your experience, for offering compassion and presence. Thank you for leaning into the perspective of others, for all the times you widen your vision.
We hope to remember moments like during a meeting of the board when a conversation ensued with differing strong opinions. A trustee said, “We’re all people of good faith here, and we’re acting on good faith.”
Thank you for all the cards and letters of love and appreciation you have sent us throughout the years. Those messages have sustained us through tough times, and when things have been going well, they have made our hearts sing.
Thank you for ministering to us. Eighteen years ago, all four of our parents participated in our installation as your co-ministers. During our years with you, all four of our parents’ health declined and all four have died. Through our losses, you have offered us care and comfort.
Thank you for entrusting your heartbreaks and hopes with us, for sharing your stories and your lives. When I was asked recently what I would most miss, the answer was easy, “all the stories.”
Thank you for the joy of holding your babies, blessing them and welcoming them to the world. Thank you for the smiles that light up your faces and the rousing welcome you call out to those babies.
Thank you for the privilege of our presiding at memorial services and lifting up stories of so many good lives.
Thank you for the Sunday many years before Gavin Newsom opened City Hall to gay weddings. Matt and Eric celebrated their wedding in the Sunday service. They brought a wedding of two men to people who had never before attended one, and they brought friends who had never before stepped inside a church into this one.
On Maryann and Cynthia’s 25th anniversary, they gave this community a glorious wedding celebration. We remember so many weddings, Music Director Bryan Baker and tenor section leader Rod Lowe’s. One Sunday many gay and lesbian couples stood on this chancel to again renew their marriage vows in a legal wedding.
We remember too heart-breaks and break-ups and resilience and new life.
Thank you for laughter and tears and your speaking what you know and listening to one another.
Thank you for your and the kids’ enthusiasm for the annual Bring Your Weight In Food Drive. What a joy to see the truck fill with thousands of pounds of food for the Richmond Emergency Food Pantry. Thank you for all the way your engage with the larger community and stand on the side of love and justice.
Thank you for partnering with a church in Transylvania and hosting visiting Transylvania ministers.
Thank you for being a teaching church and for all the student and intern ministers with whom we’ve shared ministry.
Thank you for being a church that nurtures members as they respond to the call to go to seminary and into ministry ~ Jane Ramsey, Kathleen Owens, Craig Scott, Sue Magidson, Aija Simpson.
You are a church where seminarians have made their home during their years of grad school, and you welcome ministers who retire and join the congregation.
You know the blessings of having so many ministers serve as community ministers and chaplains, social justice leaders, worship and workshop leaders.
Thank you for the religious educators we’ve learned from and with whom we’ve collaborated.
Yesterday we participated in the ordination of last year’s family minister Amy Moses-Lagos. We gave her the gift of a stole depicting a tree with strong roots and trunk with branches reaching out, leafing out. May it remind her of her year with this congregation and of this church’s mosaic Tree of Life, and of how all ages can collaborate and create beauty.
We give thanks for seeing you in candlelight on Christmas Eve.
Thank you for sitting in quiet in the darkness.
Thank you for your willingness to be playful, to be alive, awake, alert, and enthusiastic.
Thank you for dancing, all of us winding our way like a vine around the sanctuary.
Thank you for beautiful music.
Thank you to the choir for singing, “May Sun Warm You.”
Thank you for the glorious seasons on this hill top, fog touching lightly, the crystal clear views after rain, the rosy gold sunsets, the springtime blossoming dogwood, roses, calla lilies, rhododendrons and azaleas.
One spring Sunday many years ago, I was celebrating the blossoms. I wanted to praise crocuses and daffodils and what came out of my mouth was “crocodils.” Jenny Johnston was then part of the congregation. Jenny turned my mistake into two stoles appliqued with long green stemmed, bright yellow crocodils. We recently passed those two stoles on to our former intern minister Marcus Liefert and his fiancé Emily Webb. As the two of us step away from professional ministry, we are grateful Marcus and Emily, these two good people, will step up to serve as co-ministers in an associate ministry position in Rochester, New York. We are grateful for the next generation of ministers.
Thank you for it all: mistakes, accomplishments, joys and tears.
I wanted in my ministry to come to know you and love you, for you to love each other and to love the world with the fullness of your being, your integrity and joy and service.
As a congregation we’ve known challenges, disappointments and disagreements. Still loving you has come easily and naturally.
I want us to look on the world, each other, and our own selves with love. If you are asked to look upon one another with love, for some it can feel artificial. Someone might be sitting next to someone they just had a pretty good row with at a meeting or over the breakfast table. And yet, maybe if we can look with tenderness, look with love, it might help us through to a better place.
Look around. Encourage each other’s goodness with your loving look.
Behold one another.
You are a good congregation, beautiful, worthy, and you will always dear to us.
What do I say? I could speak of tender conversations, people generous with their appreciation and good wishes. I could speak of hopes and uncertainty, of doors that may or may not open. I could speak of another sunrise, light moving across the sky. I could speak of sunrise within, awakening to a new day with wonder. I could speak of visiting hospital, of receiving news of sickness. I could speak of the stark reminders that this gift of living is tenuous; it asks, not to be taken for granted, but with gratitude. I could speak of the promise of new life, the spark that leads to a heart beating and lungs breathing, being passed to a new generation. I could speak of the tearing apart politics produces, the human compulsion to hoard, the discipline of letting go…the possibility of new insight in every moment. Or, I could just say “Thank You.”
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
There is so much more.
Invisible threads weave us one with another, a tapestry whose threads never really break, whose beauty will grow as we step back and take it all in.
The two of us will grow to learn even more what John Muir knew. “These beautiful days must enrich all my life. They saturate themselves into every part of the body and live always.”
Amen.
Closing Blessing
Invitation to join hands…
There will be thorns and roses.
What sustains you?
For what are you grateful?
What are the experiences
that enrich your life,
that saturate themselves
into every part of your body
and live with you always?
Share them with one another,
and give thanks.
Turn each other’s mistakes
into beautiful crocodils.
Copyright © 2014, Revs. Barbara and Bill Hamilton-Holway
