Sermon at The Church of the Holy Apostles, New York City
August 3, 2008, The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A
The Reverend Elizabeth G. Maxwell
Genesis 32:22-31
Psalm 17
Romans 9:1-5
Matthew 14:13-21

O great God,
as we come before you,
help us to remember
that all life, that each life
snails and suns,
mountains and trees and rivers,
great whales and tiny sparrows
and even human beings
springs from your heart
and is fed by your hand.

Help us to remember
that in all our times and seasons,
wherever the path takes us,
in grief and joy,
in life and in death,
ending and beginning,
we too are held
in the mystery of your love,
in the communion of saints,
in the company of creation. 
As we come before you,
o great God,
help us to remember-
and to join our voices
with their great chorus
of prayer and praise.
Amen.

     What an amazing time we have had.  Last week was one of those remarkable Holy Apostles events as we said a bittersweet, very wonderful farewell to Father Bill and Jane, celebrating their 25 years among us and marking the end of the pastoral relationship that Bill has had with this community as rector.  We've had eight months to prepare and to process, eight months of gratitude, of forgiving, of love and remembering and saying goodbye, and in the end we came to that ritual which I think really did something- certainly for me and my sense was for all of us gathered- in crystallizing the change.  We did it in true Holy Apostles style, as fully as we could.  And now we're living into it.

     One friend said to me, "It must feel like the first like the first day of the rest of everybody's life."  I don't know about you, but I have and can imagine that you might have a mix of feelings about the ending and the beginning, about what is absent and all that is present, about loss and also about possibility.

     Our life here will change and it will also remain constant.  This time that we are entering is a time of open space, liminal space, that unknown space between.  It's a threshold time, an interim time.  We are on a journey together, here in this community, and we take it step-by-step, gradually discovering and living into it.

     This time will be marked by the commitment and good work of the vestry and the wardens leading us, by the search committee who have already begun to do their important and good work, and also, by my continued presence and new role as interim rector and by the great clergy support of Father Barry and our other associate clergy, and the new support that John Denaro will bring when he joins us in a couple of weeks.

     In this time we will have many opportunities to reflect and explore, starting with a forum that we will have next week after coffee hour.  That will be the first of many conversations, time to come to terms with our history, to dream, to experiment, to lighten and loosen the way we've always done it, and to listen for what new ways God may be calling us to.  And this interim time is also a time for us to care for each other, to cherish our common life, and of course to continue to serve the soup kitchen guests who depend on us for their daily bread.

     As I've thought about what some aspects of the interim journey may be, I found the lessons for today a real gift.  Each of them provides us with rich images that may help us as we live into the interim time.  First, there is the story of Jacob in Genesis.  Sometime last fall- which now seems like a hundred years ago, before Bill made his announcement- I remember preaching on this very same passage and saying that it was one of the most evocative and one of my favorites in all of scripture.  Jacob has come to a crisis, a crossroads, a river crossing.  He is preparing on the next morning to confront his brother Esau, the brother he has been running from for years, the brother he cheated out of his birthright and who has thus wanted to kill him.

     But in that night before the fateful morning, Jacob is surprised by a mysterious stranger with whom he wrestles until the break of day.  He refuses to let go until this adversary, revealed as divine adversary, blesses him.  And in that blessing Jacob is changed forever.  He receives a new name; he is marked with a wound in his hip that he will carry for the rest of his life, and he takes up his destiny as the father of the nation, the one who has wrestled with God and with humanity and has lived.

     Wrestling with God and being given a new identity, a new name B what potent images for us, both individually and as a community in this time of transition.  I have some very limited experience with wrestling, but what I have taken away from it is the experience of meeting another with my full presence and weight and heft and being met in the same way.  To push against and to test our strength, to come with full engagement, a kind of fierce embrace, even a kind of dance- to allow the questions and the not knowing and the wrestling that we must do to really surface, to know that God is with us in many ways, but surely as a divine challenger and a partner, to allow ourselves to be stretched and changed and marked in this interim time.  That is the call of this particular reading.

     And then there is Paul's letter to the Romans.  In the Bible study this week, we weren't making very much headway, and as we were trying to understand what it was all about, Rachel very helpfully said, "Paul is wrestling.  He's thinking out loud, he's trying to work something out that really is new to him."

     After the profound and beautiful theology we've heard over the last few Sundays in which Paul speaks of the indwelling of the spirit in the groaning creation and the deepest prayers of believers, in which he soars from height to depth with the assurance that nothing, nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus- after all that- in this passage he speaks of his personal anguish.  He says, "I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people, my kindred according to the flesh."  What he is wrestling with is how to reconcile his experience of grace, his conviction that salvation comes through faith in Christ, with the history of God's covenant with the Jewish people, with Israel.  This particular question that Paul is asking is, I have to say, not one that troubles me- nor, I venture to say, most of us at Holy Apostles.  I am convinced that God's immense and infinitely inventive love permeates all faith traditions and has room for many paths, and certainly for our Jewish brothers and sisters.

     After two more chapters of wrestling, Paul will come to an answer that is not without ambiguity but clearly enlarges his understanding.  He will say the gifts and call of God are irrevocable.  But that is for another Sunday.  What I do find compelling about this passage, and the reason that I raise it in this sermon, is that Paul is so human here.  He's struggling with his love for his people.  It raises for me the question of what and who we love enough to sacrifice for them.  It invites us to look at the boundaries of our community and the limits of our inclusiveness.  It raises the question of how we understand who God is.  It asks in this time of transition a very personal question: who are my people?  To whom are I accountable, and what is my particular calling?

     The themes of calling and of growth and stretching in the wilderness also find a resonance in the gospel lesson for today.  A crowd has followed Jesus after he has withdrawn to a deserted place, and he has taught and healed them with great compassion late into the evening.  The disciples come to him with a very practical concern -- they're hungry.

     "The hour is late," they say.  "Send all these people away so that they may go into the villages and get something to eat."  But Jesus' response challenges and surely astonishes them: "They don't have to go away!  You give them something to eat."

     Jesus!  Jesus!  We have almost nothing here; we have only five loaves and two fish.  What good is that among more than five thousand people?

     "Bring them to me," he says, and he takes and blesses and breaks and shares the gifts they offer, and the miraculous feeding happens in abundance: enough for the crowd with twelve baskets full left over.

     This was such a vital story in the memory of the first Christians that it is recorded in every Gospel and depicted in numerous pieces of early church art, and it is an equally vital story for us.  It reminds us of how our early forebears were fed with manna on their long wilderness journey and how they were required to renew their trust in God's provision every morning, because manna that was gathered from the day before and kept overnight turned to worms and was inedible.

     But even more significantly for Christians, this story is a eucharistic story.  It's a reminder that we are fed at God's table by the mystery of God's love.  It reminds us that the gifts we offer are taken and blessed and transformed by the presence of Christ and that they are broken and given to us and to the world for our deepest nourishment.  Even more, this story reminds us that if we will but step forward with the humble gifts we have, with the humble and precious gift of ourselves, we also will be taken by God's grace and blessed.  And yes, we will be broken open by life, by suffering, by compassion, by community, by the ministries we are called to.  We will be broken and given for the healing of the world.

     The Eucharist, the Great Thanksgiving, the great life-giving, is the shape not only of our worship but also of our life as Christian people.  I think we understand this at Holy Apostles.  We know that the meal that we share around this table each Sunday morning is the sustaining center of our life as a community and we also know that it is the same bread of life that we share with our hungry brothers and sisters in this very same space every Monday through Friday.

     This past month, by the way, we served the highest number of meals in the whole history of the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen.

     But it is not only in the soup kitchen -- each of us as well as all of us together are invited in this story to discern what we are called to bring forward as food in the wilderness, what small gift that may seem insignificant will make a huge difference to our life as a parish and beyond.  I've often thought, and this idea is not original with me, that the miracle of the loaves and the fishes was a miracle of sharing in which the people in the assembled crowd, seeing the disciples step forward with their small sack lunches, began to remember the sandwiches in their own back pockets and to share them with their neighbors.

     It is no small thing to move from the fearful hoarding that makes us cling to what little we have believing that it will never ever be enough, to trust in God's abundance that will allow us to offer our gifts, no matter how small, for God and for others. Surely in this interim time, in this wilderness journey, we are called to be eucharists for one another -- to actively discern and offer our gifts and to trust that God will bless and use them, and that we too will have all the nourishment that we need.

     One more thing and then I will be finished.  Even as the Holy Apostles community is entering a new phase in this time of change, so too am I in becoming your interim rector.  It is, by definition, a transitional role.  One of its goals to is to help prepare the community to receive and welcome a new rector in the fullness of time.  It is pastoral leadership with particular attention to endings and beginnings, to exploration and the need for continuity, to the open space of the journey from what has been to what is becoming.  I feel ready to take this up, and I am also quite sure that I have much to learn and discover about what I will be called to do and be in the months ahead.

     I welcome that challenge and that learning, and I need your prayers and your help.  I will count on the gifts that each of you can bring, and the sacred wrestling with God that we will all do together.  I love this community deeply, and I am both committed and grateful to be able to share in this part of the journey with you all.

     Most of all, I am confident that God walks with us as we journey.  Let us move forward then with faith, trusting that the one who has brought us this far will feed and bless and guide us all along our way.

     Amen.