"Our Life Flows On "

LESSON FOR ALL AGES
Saying Goodbye

Today is the last Sunday you and I will be getting together up here on the chancel for our time together. I am going away from the church. You will have another minister soon, but first we need to say goodbye.

It’s important to say goodbye, just as it is to say hello. It means, you are part of my life. When you say hello, you are saying, I see you. When you say goodbye, you are saying, I will miss you.

I will miss you. I may come back to visit the church sometime in the future, but when I do, you will all be older. And so will I.

And everything will have changed by then. The church may look different. New people will join and they will have children you will get to know. You’ll learn new stories and ideas. And you will change too. We all will.

So saying goodbye is like saying, I know everything will change now. And that is sad and happy at the same time: sad because we will miss each other, and happy because new and exciting things will happen.

Today I feel sad and happy at the same time. I’m sad because I know I will miss you. But I’m happy because I am excited about new adventures I’m planning.

When I think of you, I will always remember how well you listen – you listen even when you’re moving around, I know that now. I will always remember your questions. I’ll remember how much you know. I’ll remember how much you like to laugh. I’ll remember how sometimes you like to sit next to me and then after a while it’s time to move over for other children. I’ll remember how I watched the children of this church grow up and become wonderful young adults. And I’ll remember how much I’ve loved being your minister.

It’s important to say goodbye, because I get to tell you how much I’ll miss you and how I’ll remember you always. Go now in peace.

READING

“Song(4)” by Wendell Berry

* * *
Within the circle of our lives
we dance the circle of our years,
the circles of the seasons
within the circles of the years,
the cycles of the moon
within the circles of the seasons,
the circles of our reasons
within the cycles of the moon.
Again, again we come and go,
changed, changing. Hands
join, unjoin in love and fear,
grief and joy. The circles turn,
each giving into each, into all.
Only music keeps us here,
each by all the others held.
In the hold of hands and eyes
we turn in pairs, that joining
joining each to all again.
And then we turn aside, alone,
out of the sunlight gone
into the darker circles of return.

SERMON

We come and go, as Wendell Berry writes, joining, unjoining, keeping the circle turning. When the time comes to say goodbye, the gear shifts and we move on, whether we are ready or not. All life goes this way, one evolutionary turn after another. It is necessary, even good, when you see it from the perspective of the circle.

But we are fractional; we see coming and going as evidence of life’s instability, waiting warily to find out what happens next. “Hands join, unjoin, in love and fear,” writes Wendell Berry. It’s always one or the other. Saying goodbye may cause us to fear that we are on the losing end of the cosmic scheme.

Some just want to avoid it altogether. During the last month of her life, my mother refused to say goodbye, whatever the circumstances. Not when I said goodbye to her before going home to California. And not when I returned to be with her as she was dying. She never said goodbye to any of us, leaving me, my brothers, her closest friends, and her caregivers all feeling rejected and at loose ends. Goodbye may be painful, but no goodbye is worse.

We need to acknowledge comings and goings, because they are what close the circle. Because the circle never ends. It only turns, “each giving into each,” gathering up the hellos and goodbyes, the love, fear, grief, and joy, carrying us with it, “into all.” There is no better place to pay attention to hello and goodbye than here in church. For this is where we come to remember the circle. Here we gather with others to experience the comings and goings of life, to witness the endless change. Here we create the circle that holds us and carries us along, evidence of the larger circle to which we all belong.

I am leaving this circle now. And so I say goodbye to you, not forever, but goodbye to these Sunday mornings, and then later this summer, goodbye to my work as your settled minister. While you move on as a congregation, I will step aside. I will take up my new position as your Minister Emerita; time will pass; relationships will change; and life will go on. No one can predict what will happen over the next few years, although it’s safe to say you will have a new minister; and the circle will turn. Today is for saying goodbye to our time-honored roles as preacher and congregation. For fifteen years, less a couple of sabbaticals and summer vacations, I have stepped into this pulpit on Sunday and you have come to church. Many of you have also taken part in the service in various ways; I haven’t been all alone up here. You have been good company.

One of the qualities that attracted me to the church many years ago was the intimacy of this sanctuary. Someone once described it as a “soulful” place, where you could come in search of humanity and find it, not only in the human dimensions of the space, but in yourself. The closeness of being here together, combined with the quality of attention you pay to everything that happens, make this hour full for all of us.

I’ve always liked how carefully you listen. Just like the children, who hear everything even if they are moving around while they do, you are always listening. You have nurtured me with your listening. I’m sure I became a preacher because I am the middle child between two brothers. I never managed to hold my own at the family dinner table, where others held forth confidently on the news of the day. Rather I sulked and stored up resentment about nobody listening to me. You wouldn’t have any way of knowing this, but you have healed that childhood wound with your attention.

What happens here on Sunday morning often has that personal quality, as stories are told and lives are beheld by the caring witness of others. Comings and goings are more bearable here, in each other’s presence. And we learn how to look at life events from the perspective of the circle. What once was fractional becomes whole.

We are not all alone. And we are not just together. We also belong to our historic faith, which has expressed itself in many ways over the years, longer than you or I have been here. It too is present Sunday mornings, calling us to an even larger vision of who we are. We come together this way because we need to be part of a whole, and not just because it’s bigger than we are. We need it to show us how to live in this complex and often discouraging time. We learn a way of being in the world grounded in specific values and expectations that we bring to every gathering, every interaction, every decision we make.

We may not be devout in any conventional sense. Our irreverence can be easily misunderstood. And our faith – or whatever you want to call it – is so completely who we are that we know it mainly by what we do.

So some of you have made casseroles, week after week; and brought them to our kitchen, so that they can go on to Daybreak Shelter. Some of you recently spent several Saturdays over in the Valley asking people not to sign a petition for an amendment in the California constitution against same sex marriage. Some of you have spoken your mind even when you knew others would disagree; you took a stand, voice quavering, and risked what felt like everything for truth. And you did these things because you knew they were right; because service and justice and tolerance are ingrained into the life of this community.

We didn’t invent these values, they were handed down by people before us, who also rolled up their sleeves and took stands and sometimes even died for the freedom to have a meaningful life. When we do our work, it lifts us up and joins us to all the people who came before or will come after. It also makes us who we are. And who we are is always more than we realize. This is how our life flows on, how we are part of the larger cycle of nature and of history, how we are carried along, who knows, perhaps not indifferently, until we return to the source.

What you and I have experienced together here over these fifteen years is part of a living tradition, but it is also unique to who we are and the circumstances in which we live. We have shared so much, from the Northridge earthquake to 9/11, elections, wars, the housing bubble, and the climate crisis. We have witnessed tragedy and grief, and then witnessed how we pull ourselves together and move on.

No one is the same. We have all been changed by life, by happiness and joy, by loss, illness and sorrow. And we have poured it all into these Sunday gatherings, in offering words and music, and in noticing the presences and absences in this room.

Since I have been your minister, I have lost both my parents – as have many of you. But so many good things have happened too. I have met and married my husband, David Denton. I have settled down in a way I never did before – amazingly, here in California. I have made a life I never thought I could have. This has come about because of you.

And so, over the years you have heard the stories about how my life with you has transformed me. How the comings and goings of this community have touched us all, strangers and friends, because we are connected not just by our humanity but by the values of our faith tradition. We have become something only we could become, personal and precious and irreplaceable.

Now the time has come to say goodbye to that, to acknowledge an ending and to greet a new beginning. The stories and faces and times will change, but not the circle, and not the faith that makes us whole. We have kept the faith. We have held each other, “joining each to all.” Now the circle turns and we go with it, trusting the endless cycles to carry us forward.