Faithfulness Not Clinginess
Reflections on General Synod Sunday
John 20.1-18
14 July 2019
Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral
New Westminster BC
For the past few years Holy Trinity has had a small paid staff of a full-time priest in charge, a part-time administrator, a very part-time verger and a paid musician. Finding office space was relatively easy, an office for the administrator, an office for the priest in charge and music space. But this past Monday our comfortable arrangements were disrupted by the arrival of our new Assistant Curate, Tasha Carrothers. Where were we going to put Tasha?
We finally settled on the Archives and began to carve out space where Tasha can work and meet with folks. But carving out space was not and is not easy. We’ve found a number of things, some of them remarkable --- for various reasons --- and a fair number of things that we’ve been clinging to for years with no clear idea why. I’ve gone through some of the old books in the hopes that they are harbouring $100 bills or stocks or other negotiable securities. No luck. I’ve looked through the books thinking that there might some spectacular historic letter or other document that might solve a mystery, but most of the books are simply old books to which one or more people were attached.
It is a natural human emotion to want to cling to things that remind us of people and events in our lives. In some cases these objects have a story to tell to other people. In most cases, however, the stories these objects may played a role in telling is no longer known to those of us who follow. Because these things have meant something to people we have known and love, we put them on bookshelves or in cabinets as an act of respect. We know, even as we do this, that they will never play a role in our lives nor in the lives of those who come after us.
So we need to de-clutter. We sort through things and make the hard but necessary choice to send them on to their final resting-place --- so long as it is not here.
Part of the problem is that we confuse clinginess with faithfulness. Clinginess is an attitude that is oriented to an imaginary past and is often accompanied by fear. Clinginess is not about building on the values and strengths of our past in order to have a firm foundation to move forward into God’s future. It’s more about holding tightly to institutions, ideas and ways of behaving because we are uncertain about the future. Clinginess can generate feelings of enmity, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissension and partisanship, because we feel threatened.
Faithfulness to genuine tradition is an entirely different attitude. When we are faithful to people, to institutions and to values and ideas, we have confidence to ask ourselves hard questions. How does this relationship challenge me to grow into the full stature of Christ? How does this institution provide a structure for the proclamation of the good news of God in Christ rather than simply serve itself? How do the values and ideas that our forerunners in the faith have passed on to me become the energy that fuels my commitment to God’s mission and the ministries God has entrusted me to exercise? Where clinginess generates fear, faithfulness generates hope
John captures this tension in today’s gospel. Mary came to the garden in despair and fear. Her hope had been nailed to the cross with Jesus. Now she sees him, not entirely the man she knew before, transfigured, radiant with new life. Is it any surprise that her initial reaction is to reach out to hold on to him, hoping that this new life so evident in him will somehow fill her own body and soul, strength and mind?
But Jesus stops her. I’ve always wondered why and I think that I’m close to understanding. Jesus recognizes that she is reaching out for the past and for the restoration of the relationship they had before the events of that last week in Jerusalem. She doesn’t yet understand that God in and through Jesus has brought a beloved community into being and is transforming it in and through the work of the Holy Spirit. Jesus’ work is finished. The Spirit’s work has begun. God has revealed and is revealing that eternal life, genuine life, heart-racing, mind-bracing, hope-restoring life has come into the world. What God began in creation; what God renewed in the life and ministry of Jesus; what God is shaping through the Spirit calls for faithful de-cluttering rather than clinging to the past.
More than a hundred and fifty years ago, when the American Episcopal Church was contemplating what was necessary to re-unite Christians, they courageously chose values and beliefs that could be put in our carry-on luggage rather than a checked bag in which you could stuff three people. They looked at the rich heritage of the Anglican way of discipleship and decided what embodied faithfulness rather than clinginess.
(1) Christians are a community that gathers around the sacred stories, poetry, letters and mystical writings of the Jewish people and the earliest generations of Jesus’ disciples. In these writings we discern God’s voice and call to us. In these writings we learn what it means to be fully alive and we need little to nothing more.
(2) Christians know that there is a great difference between what these writings say and what they mean. What we need to know is that God created all that is, seen and unseen, out of love, that God seeks life-giving and life-enriching relationships with and between human beings and with the whole creation itself, that God freely gives wisdom to all who seek it.
(3) Christians are a people who gather around the font to ‘draw the circle wide’ not to ‘build walls that divide’. Christians gather around the table to share in the bread and the wine of new life, not as the meal of a closed society but as a foretaste of the banquet to which God invites all human beings by going out into the highways and the byways, the alleys and boulevards, the concrete jungles and the wooded suburbs.
(4) Christians require leaders who are committed to apostolic mission rather than institutional preservation, who gather us into life-giving and life-sustaining communities rather than like-minded gatherings of well-intentioned people, who animate our self-sacrificial service of our neighbours and our courageous advocacy for the needs and wants of the many rather than warm feelings of charity and benevolence.
We are called to be faithful to the God who comes to us in Jesus and who breathes the Spirit into us. And faithfulness frightens me. Faithfulness means letting go of unquestioned assumptions about who is and who is not held within the circle of faith. Faithfulness means a lifetime commitment to de-cluttering my heart, mind and soul of the trappings of the status quoand imagining what new thing God is doing in and through us as a community of disciples and in and through me as one washed in water and anointed by the Spirit in baptism.
Sometimes when I’m out and about, I see children holding the hands of adults. I remember what it felt like to hold the hands of my children as we bravely walked out into the unknown, perhaps to school, perhaps shopping, perhaps simply on a walk around the neighbourhood. It was a magical feeling. And I also remember the times of clinging when it felt as if my child were trying to fuse herself or himself into my body. Not so magical.
Friends, de-cluttering the household of faith is not easy work and we all hesitate sometimes and cling to practices and traditions which no longer serve, if they ever did. We hesitate and we take two steps forward and one step backwards. But this General Synod meeting in Vancouver has many faithful people holding each other’s hands and walking bravely into ‘ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown’ because we recognize the Hand that is holding all of ours, coaxing us along. [1] So let us keep calm. Let us remember what we really need for our journey. And let’s not be afraid, when our faithfulness seems overshadowed by clinginess, to de-clutter like mad.
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