Scripture: Matthew 16:21-28
Some of us were moving books around the office earlier this week trying to get a small library set up for the use of Sojourners, especially books relating to our leading concern of racial justice and our emphasis on combating heterosexism. Trying and succeeding. We do now have some books available. The selection will certainly grow in the future, but if you want to check out what we have, stop by the office sometime. In any case, as we were moving books around, I noticed a book that I had forgotten I had, called “Necessary Losses”, by Judith Viorst. It’s one of those books that I own that I may not have read, but the title seemed appropriate for what I had in mind to talk about this morning, so I stole it for the sermon. I didn’t have time to actually go back and read the book. I just used the title.
I didn’t actually want to read very much of the book because I already knew in general what I wanted to say this week, and I didn’t want to confuse myself (which is easily done). What I had in mind for today goes with what I was talking about last week. In fact I wouldn’t want to let last week’s sermon stand on its own, for reasons that I’ll get to today. I didn’t want to say then I was going to preach another two-part sermon. I was afraid you would think I was making it a habit. But that is how I’m thinking of this sermon. It is different from last week, but very much connected to it and a continuation of it. To the extent that there is any truth in my words from last week, it was only a half-truth, and so I need to finish what I wanted to say.
I was saying last week that one of the wonderful things about coming to Sojourners four years ago was that it offered me an atmosphere of success that I was unaccustomed to, having served churches for most of my thirty years in the ministry where there was a constant heaviness in the air because of a fear of the future, a worry about how long the congregation would be able to continue in any meaningful form. I said that even with all the uncertainty we have faced ourselves as a new church start, which is always an uncertain venture, that the upbeat mood I found at Sojourners and that has been confirmed in the experience of the last four years had been important to me at both a professional and a personal level. And then I reflected just a little on the notion of success, asking us to think about how we are going to define it at Sojourners and to keep that question open, but also offering just a few preliminary thoughts on the subject of success as it applies to churches in general and Sojourners in particular.
What I didn’t say last week, intentionally didn’t say because I didn’t have the time to give it adequate attention is that four years is also enough time to have experienced significant losses in the life of this congregation. And until I include loss in the picture of congregational life as I have experienced it over the last four years, until I include loss in that picture, acknowledge it, talk about it, name it, embrace it, anything I might have said about success at Sojourners is much less than a half truth. It is probably more like an untruth or a deceit.
We have known losses. It is part of what being part of Sojourners over time comes to mean. If you are relatively new to Sojourners, you have escaped the losses maybe, but if you stay at Sojourners, of course, you will not escape them for very long. Just in the short four years I have been here, I have felt the loss of people who I have worked with and played with, people who I have benefited from and disagreed with, people I have shared significant experiences with, both of joy and of trouble, people who have offered me kindnesses of many kinds, people who participated in calling me to be here, people who in many ways have been deeply identified with my Sojourners experience. I miss them of course because I miss their contributions to the life of the church, but I also just plain miss them.
If I mention the names of Konrad and Georgia Mueller, Barba and Richard Merriwether, Beth Ryan and Jenny O’Flaherty, you will understand that I don’t mention them to set them apart but to give a few names to the losses we have sustained, and to conjure up perhaps the names of others who for each of us have been very much associated with the life of the church. For me I also know that some of the losses I feel are people I didn’t get to know much at all, and the loss is felt more as missed opportunity, a regret that I didn’t have the chance to get to know that particular person better. And of course in all cases of loss, it is the case that to one degree or another you wish you had had a longer or deeper relationship than what turned out to be possible. We have known losses as a congregation.
And on top of that we have known losses as individuals. During the last four years, my frame of reference in relating to Sojourners, many of us have grieved the loss of important people in our personal lives. They may not have had much to do, or anything to do, with Sojourners as such, except that they are losses borne by the people of this community and we each continue to carry them with us when we gather. We have known, we continue to know, those losses too.
And there will be more. We already know that we are going to be losing the Copelands. I don’t want to embarrass them too much this morning. We can do that later. I know they are not leaving quite yet, and I certainly don’t want to hurry them along. I know that they will not want us to make a big deal about it when they do leave. I know that they have every confidence that we will go right on being Sojourners—successfully—after they leave. I know we have every confidence that we will do that. But still we will feel their leaving as a loss, and they will have to let us do that, because we need to do that. If we don’t—not just with Carole and Bruce, of course, but in any instance of loss—if we deny our losses, we will not be successful.
It is not success to have no place in the common life for loss or for grief. Success is not an approach that leaves no room for loss. Success is not an approach that sees a sense of loss or of grieving as an unwelcome intrusion on one’s positive mental attitude, or an obstacle to the march forward, whatever forward march we may imagine for ourselves. Success is not an approach where you set your sights on a goal and just decide not to pay attention to anything else and thus treat losses as inconvenient or irrelevant. Success is not the ability to just always move ahead and cast aside anything that might interfere with that. Success is not any of these things, I’m thinking probably not in any situation or any area of life, but certainly not in the church.
In theological talk, or church-type talk, there is something called triumphalism. Triumphalism, though it could be thought of or described in many ways, triumphalism is what I have been talking about this morning, arguing against that is. Triumphalism is, among other things, when success becomes a kind of a spiritual tyranny, when success is defined as winning, when success leaves no room for woundedness or doubt or loss. Triumphalism trumpets success.
Triumphalism shows up in various ways in all kinds of places. One place it shows up that bothers me sometimes is in the hymns that we sing. You are probably aware that our New Century Hymnal was created with a number of goals in mind beside just collecting a bunch of songs for church. The people who put it together wanted the collection to be not completely Eurocentric, to be significantly multi-cultural. They wanted the language to be inclusive, not only not referring to people with exclusively male pronouns, but also to use language, and not only words, but concepts that expand our ideas and images of God, getting away from the man-in-the-sky image and suggesting other ways of referring to God. They tried to get away from too much military language. They tried to get away from the language of “thee” and “thou” and “thine”, in favor of more everyday language. They tried to get rid of language that spoke of hierarchy and control, like king and lord, and move more toward language that spoke of cooperation and collaboration and loving presence. I support all that enthusiastically. I like the New Century Hymnal, though occasionally I find myself singing a hymn by heart and realize I’m singing something different from the rest of you. But I am in favor of all those efforts, though I have my own little wishes, as I know many of you do, that with regard to this hymn or that that we really liked the way it was, that maybe the editors could have put aside their principles once in a while just a little bit.
But that’s minor. My only real problem with our hymnal is that it seems to me that triumphalism was not more often one of the issues considered. I have not gone through and counted up the number of hymns that I would consider as having this kind of triumphalist mentality, but I know that on some Sundays when I have been in a kind of a quiet or sad mood, or when the theme of the service is more reflective and attuned to our woundedness, that it just seemed that every hymn I turned to was having me sing about glory and conquering and victory and bliss and praise and majesty and power and might. A lot of hymnals, including the New Century, do not include Onward Christian Soldiers because of the military language, but to me I’m not always sure I see that Forward Through the Ages, different words to the same tune, are a big improvement. “Forward through the ages in unbroken line, move the faithful spirits at the call divine. Bound by God’s far purpose in one living whole, move we on together to the shining goal.”
I don’t mean to be crabby about this. I like marching songs sometimes. I’m fine with a God of grace and God of glory. And I don’t have to subscribe to every word I sing. And every hymn I sing doesn’t have suit my mood. But no more is God to be described in all male language than is God to be described in words like glory, majesty, victory, dominion, and power. Sadness is a major part of the life of God. At least that is the case for the god who is real to me. And the reason I took off on this little digression about hymns is because I want there to be a place for this God in the songs that we sing, and more importantly of course I want there to be a place for this God in life of this community in general, and in the faith that we express in so many different ways, but that at some deep level we share.
Probably if there is no room in our theology or our faith for a non-triumphant god, there will be not enough room in our spirits to acknowledge our losses. And we do need both to allow ourselves to have losses and to allow them to be felt as losses. We need to deal with the comings and goings of people from our community with prayers and blessings and gratitude, but also not to pretend that there is no sense of loss. And that is just the beginning. There are so many kinds of losses we have to deal with. For instance, many Sojourners come here from experiences in other faith communities. We come from places, church experiences, that we had to leave behind for one reason of another. They were necessary losses. But—maybe this won’t be true in every case, but in most cases—they were still losses.
And speaking of losing churches, Sojourners will lose itself, it will lose itself many times over as we together move—successfully we trust—into the future. We will leave behind previous versions of ourselves, just as we as individuals leave behind previous versions of ourselves. As congregation we will know that kind of necessary loss too, and it is probably just as important for us to reflect on what it is we will lose and will need to lose, as it is to reflect on what success will look like for us.
There is a big difference between dwelling ourselves in places of loss or grief and leaving a space for loss to dwell in us. And we need not only to accept but to embrace somehow what we lose, because what we lose has a lot to do with who we are. And allowing our losses to just be, not to control us, but also not to pretend they are not losses, allowing them to just be is as important to our life as a congregation as it is to our life as individuals. To acknowledge our losses, even to honor them, is I believe one of the things that success is all about. Amen.
Jim Bundy
February 8, 2004