Romans 8:18-27
Last Saturday, and really the whole weekend, was a wonderful celebration I am still living with – the wedding of my daughter Lorena to Hannah Brubacher Kaethler up at Silver Lake Mennonite Camp. It was a great weekend, perfect weather, and a special one for me as a father. My heart is full! A weekend like this brings together so many good people – family, friends, extended community – the people that know and love both Lorena and Hannah. There was so much laughter and fun, wonderful story telling and the making of promises, so much love and support, and also the occasional father tear, because of all that love. As a parent, a wedding represents a time of transition in life and in family. There is a fuller letting go in trust of an already very independent daughter, and a welcoming of her life partner more completely into our family circles. It’s all good, but it does change the relationships into something new.
As parents, we couldn’t help thinking back to Lorena’s growing up years. In our parent speech we told all sorts of cute and funny stories, mixed in with the personality traits and strength of character inherent very young already and matured into the adult we see now. And we gave her an extra large gift of ‘choclat’, one of her earliest words, that is after her very first sentence – ‘I had it first.’ We inwardly gave thanks for the many mentors and guides along the way and hoped that in the midst of both our flaws and our strengths as parents, we helped give her a good foundation for life. We gave thanks for the church communities that helped raise and shape her, and are grateful for the gentle and profound ways this congregation walked through the process of becoming an LGBTQ+ welcoming congregation when unbeknownst to us, she and a younger generation were watching closely. Now Lorena and Hannah begin their married life together in Ottawa – Lorena starting a teaching career and Hannah studying as a paramedic.
As I step back from this wedding, if I am honest, I recognize that I am in, and have been for awhile, some sort of larger life transition time. Sometimes it is named as Empty Nest – that time in life, if you have children, of them leaving home and becoming established with their own households, dreams and pursuits and ways of living in the world. We already celebrated Micah and Molly’s wedding early in the pandemic, and Nathan, while he lived at home for this gap year, is off to Western and teacher’s college this Fall, and even while at home, he’s no longer been that dependent child. This transition to a new life stage was reinforced for me a couple of months ago when Micah and Molly excitedly told us that we were going to become grandparents if all goes well – in November of course, all our kid’s birth month. I am too young to be a Grandpa! But really I know I’m not, and I am thrilled. All these things represent a transition in how I think about myself, and I keep needing to wrap my head around it and living into new identities.
Today is the last Sunday of our wonderful Spring worship theme – ‘The Things That Nourish’, and today’s word and theme is: Transitions. A bit like our Grace Lao Picnic Sunday on Challenges, Transitions is not the first word we associate with being nourished. Yet we know that all of us will experience many many times of transition or change in our lives. As Greek Philosopher Heraclitus said already 500 years before Christ, ‘Nothing is constant except change itself.’ Whether a transition in life is joyful or challenging, full of potential or sorrow, it puts us into a strange in-between place. By paying attention to what is all going on in these times, and how God is present, transitions can become gifts that nourish us and prepare us well for whatever the new thing is to come.
Much of my inspiration to think about the theme of Transitions came from a workshop I attended in February at the Pastor’s Week at AMBS, our Mennonite seminary in Elkhart, Indiana, on the topic ‘Marking Adulthood Transitions.’ It was led by Joel Miller, a pastor serving at Columbus Mennonite Church in Ohio. He began by noting all of the church milestones for ages 0-18 – dedications, Grade 2 gifts, Grade 8 Bibles, baptisms, graduations, prayer shawls, etc, and then asking what about years 18 to 100, a much longer time period with very few transition rituals – mostly weddings and funerals. He then asked us to name all the different kinds of life transitions we could think of, or we have gone through. Within minutes we had a list of 20-30 – including childbirth, stillbirths, adoptions, separation and divorce, re-marriage, job promotions or changes, second careers, job loss, retirement, empty nest, geographical moves, getting a new pet, going back to school, injuries or significant health shifts, downsizing or shifting living arrangements, going to assisted living or long term care, loss of a partner, deaths of loved ones, spiritual crisis or re-orientation, and we could go on. I thought about the pastoral transition we are in right now with Kevin’s leaving.
I figured the workshop was going to help us think about how to mark all these many transitions in worship, and he did eventually circle back to worship, but instead he outlined a fascinating church program on transitions they have piloted for several years now at Columbus Mennonite. Once a year, they invite 8-10 people to sign up for a very intentional 2 month process to engage whatever personal transitions people are going through. People commit to attending an opening weekend retreat, a series of 6 Sunday School classes, a closing weekend retreat, and then a Sunday where what has been gained and learned is ritually shared back with the congregation. It is an intense experience of sharing with each other in what becomes a trusted small group for those months, and he had pages and pages of resources on what they all do together. We caught only a glimpse. For this morning, coming out of one of their sessions, I want to share 3 primary images or metaphors for thinking about transitions, before adding a 4th more theological one that comes via one of Kevin’s very first sermons preached before he even came to SJMC. I hope these 4 Images can help us each hold and ponder whatever transitions we might be going through in life right now.
- (First Image) In the End is Our Beginning. This is a linear story telling image with a twist. Normally we start a story with the beginning, move to the middle and then get to the ending – start to finish, like a good novel. This image invites us to reverse the order when we are in a life transition. It starts with an ending and ends with a beginning. With a transition our starting point is to recognize that something is coming to an end. Trying to begin something without ending well isn’t good. We need to pay attention to the ending first, whether this was a long planned ending or a sudden event, whether longed for or dreaded or one with mixed emotions. Because with a transition we enter into an in-between period that is neither here nor there. It is a vulnerable and often disorienting space, Limbo, neutral, some would say a thin place where we are more open to the divine. Before we can move on, we have to deal with and process the ending, the letting go, the leaving of what has been. Only then is there room for a new beginning, a birth, an emerging and taking hold, a re-orientation in all its mystery. Frederick Buechner writes ‘We find by losing. We hold fast by letting go. We become something new by ceasing to be something old. This seems to be close to the heart of that mystery… Out of Nothing God creates Something. Out of the End he creates the Beginning. Out of each old self that dies some precious essence is preserved for the new self that is born; and with in the child-self that is part of us all, there is perhaps nothing more precious than the fathomless capacity to trust.’ (https://www.frederickbuechner.com/quote-of-the-day/2021/7/1/by-letting-go?utm_medium=email&_hsmi=262455422&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8zXSgj9fC-kz7n5_4IDY1UbcCsR_h0v5lX4qlbBdf8uUhPKD_YPxlBoxsDmoHr6L91AjlWFaF8Kp_k9NkPDVej2hME6Q&utm_content=262455422&utm_source=hs_email) This is a journey of trust, trusting as the hymn says – in the end is our beginning. I am very grateful for the wonderful and intentional Farewell weekend we had for Kevin and the Derksen family. We laughed and cried and fully celebrated the good that has been, and then released them into their own new future. As a congregation, by paying attention to a good ending, we can now trust and move forward into a new beginning yet to come.
- Death, Descent, Resurrection. This was Joel Miller’s second image from the workshop. For the first image, Joel had basically a straight linear line – just that you start from the ending and move to the beginning. For this second image, he used a parabola – a line that suddenly loops down or descends to a bottom point before coming back up to the top. This is the transition journey Jesus went through with the cross and resurrection. This is finding oneself suddenly on the Saturday after Good Friday, when you don’t know if Easter will come. In many ways, this is an image for the unexpected and often sudden, unwelcome transitions where it feels like you immediately descend to the depths of despair. This is the Psalm 23, even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death – with the hope you cling to – I will fear no evil, for you are with me. When you go through this kind of transition, you do not yet know what Resurrection could possibility look like. All that is left is trust that good can somehow come out of what feels so hard. It is often a time of looking at the shadows of one’s life. One of the exercises Joel has people walk through with this image, is living into the 7 Last Words of Jesus. To name a few: ‘Forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing’ – what needs to be forgiven, released, let go of – even things undone by others? ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?’ – where does one feel abandonment, forsaken by God?. ‘I thirst’ – what have been the physical manifestations of this transition? ‘It is finished.’ – what is finished? And ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ – What can we surrender? How can we trust in God, even now? This image is ultimately about trust – a trust that somehow resurrection will happen, even if we cannot control or predict what that might look like. It is taking hope from the words we heard in Romans 8 – The Spirit helps us in our weakness and intercedes with sighs too deep for words. There are endings, transitions, often the tough ones, where this image of death, descent and resurrection fits and can help us.
- Widening Circles. The last image Joel Miller shared was that of a Widening Circle, like the rings of a tree. There are times when we push up against the edges of what we have known, and find our previous ways of living, thinking, believing and existing are no longer big enough. It is time to transition to the next concentric circle outward of our lives – because that is where new life and new growth can happen. Like a tree, we add another circle, another ring. Madeline L’Engle writes ‘I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be.’ In this model, we don’t deny the parts of us we are leaving behind, they are still a part of our inner core, part of who we have been, but now we add a new layer that needs to be integrated with what has been. Those inner layers, the heartwood, are often what gives us the strength, even as the wounds of previous circles are still a part of us. If you study the rings of a tree, you can tell what have been healthy wide years of growth, or narrow rings where the tree experienced some sort of hardship or injury. Each ring is still there. Our lives too carry many different rings, that are all a part of our present reality, even as with each life transition we form the next widening circle of our lives. In that Elkhart workshop, this was the new image that most captured my imagination in the moment.
- There is one more image to add to these 3, and in some ways it encompasses all of them. It is a more theological image, and comes from the letter of Paul to the Romans, but came to me in a funny way from the pen of a young Kevin Derksen well before he came to SJMC. You see, a few months ago, my parents were sorting though a bunch of old papers and files as they continued to make and arrange their new home in Waterloo after 35 years in Toronto. My Mom found a copy of a sermon that Kevin had preached at their home church – Toronto United Mennonite Church, or TUMC as it is known. Kevin was a summer student pastor from Canadian Mennonite University, supervised by my father, Gary Harder – at least for the first 2 months of the 4 month internship. You see, it was the summer of 2007 and at the end of June, my Dad retired from TUMC with a huge farewell weekend, akin to what we just went through with the Derksens, but writ even larger with retirement thrown in there. Kevin had the assignment of preaching on the low energy Sunday right after the farewell bash. My Mom recently gave Kevin back the sermon, and I saw a copy. The image in that sermon was of ‘the Unsettled Interim.’ It was a naming of the unsettled interim existence of a congregation, ‘perched a little precariously between what has been and what is yet to come,’ and full of uncertainty and the unknown – jumping between pain, grief and loss and the hope of possibility.
The gift in the sermon was to remind TUMC then, and maybe us now too at SJMC, that interim living is a profoundly Christian way to live. That larger scope of Salvation history, the time of the church, is the time between times – between the death and resurrection of Jesus and the decisive victory of Christ, but before the End, when all things will be brought to completion. We live in the already, and not yet of God’s Kingdom. We hear this in Romans 8. This interim time is one of the groaning of all creation as in labour pains, for we have the first fruits of the Spirit, but wait for a final redemption. We yearn for what is yet to come and do so in hope, with patience. As Kevin said in that sermon: ‘in a very real sense then, the most basic Christian experience is of living in the interim – of waiting and watching, hoping and praying.’ Whenever we as individuals or the church finds itself in a place of transition and uncertainly, in that unsettled interim, in that place where one is not fully in control, it may actually help us connect in a profound way with the larger Christian story, and it can be an intense and fruitful experience of trust and catching the hope of God’s Kingdom. This unsettled interim may take the form of looking back at the ending to find a new beginning or it might be a total surrender and decent into unknown darkness, waiting and hoping for new resurrection life, or it might be an expanding circle into new rings and fresh forms of life. In all these we join the Christian story, the Christian pattern of all creation in groaning for redemption from the God of all hope.
So whether it is the transitions brought to the surface by a wedding and the anticipation of becoming a grandparent, or that of an upcoming move and change of living situation, or a big job shift or retirement, or graduation and the unknown of what’s next, or a tough loss, or a pastoral team change, or maybe simply the move from Spring into a long awaited summer, we are given the promise that God will be with us, that God will intercede with sighs too deep for words, and that we can carry a deep hope that comes when we wait for it in patience. May we walk with the God of gracious surprises along this journey. Amen.