The Unsettling Interim – Kevin Derksen – June 24/07

 

The Unsettling Interim

June 24th, 2007

Kevin Derksen

 

Text:  

John 14:25-31

Romans 8:18-25

 

I was going to begin this morning by saying that June 24, 2007 is a day that will survive in TUMC consciousness only as ‘the Sunday after Gary and Lydia’s retirement weekend’.  But I have a feeling that Ginny Lepp’s wonderful Kingdom Report just now is going to make that statement untrue.  Thank you Ginny for reminding us that life goes on even without Gary, and that this church is involved in all sorts of exciting places and projects that are ongoing.  But even so, it will be hard for this Sunday to compare with last weekend.  And how could it be otherwise – what a weekend it was.  For months, the time and energies of this congregation were funneled towards that weekend.  It was fantastic, but it was a marathon; of events, of words and of emotions.  And again we might say “how could it be otherwise?”  We were celebrating the retirement of a pastor who had been here twenty years – almost unheard-of these days.  Moreover, in that time Gary and Lydia developed a very special relationship with this congregation.  A relationship of mutual love and deep respect, marked by joy and sealed in the experiences of shared pain that always accompany deep friendship.  And so the celebration of these twenty years was filled to bursting with emotional intensity.  Laughter and tears both, came easily.

But now that weekend is over.  The official celebrations and sendoffs are done, and we are back together at church again; left to start the long process of sorting through what has just taken place.  Maybe its still too early to be able to take it all in.  We’re going to have to live with this for a while.  It seems clear that something has ended, but its much less clear what that means, or what ‘the new’ will look like, or how it will come. 

This congregation has begun a time of interim existence.  A time of living in-between that’s perched a little precariously between what has been and what is yet to come.  And this isn’t always a very comfortable place to find ourselves.  It can be painful sometimes.  It can feel uncertain and unsettled, as we jump back and forth between feelings of grief and hope with dizzying speed.  Living in the interim is challenging, there is no doubt about it.  It’s hard work, and it’s not easy.  But it seems to me that interim living is not just any old challenge: it’s a profoundly Christian, and even sacred challenge.  A challenge we misunderstand if we approach it as a necessary evil that must simply be endured. 

According to the Christian account of salvation-history, the time of the church is the time between the times.  After the death and resurrection of Christ – the decisive moment in history – but before the End, when all things are brought to completion.  The church stands at the cusp of history, or at the overlap of the ages.  It remembers back to the victory already won in Christ, while straining forward to see the fulfillment of the new age, when Christ’s reign is made complete.  This is especially clear in the writings of the Apostle Paul.  Paul understands Christians to be living in the midst of a grand cosmological drama, which is playing out before our very eyes.  Paul knows that as children of Adam, we are still a part of the old age, characterized by the fallen powers of Sin and Death.  We still experience pain and suffering, violence and discord.  But Paul also knows that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ has inaugurated something new, in which the sovereignty of God is established over all these fallen powers.  Paul speaks of this new age as a ‘new creation’, now under the Lordship of Christ.  So for Paul, the present time is a time of contradiction for Christian believers, who live in the overlap of these ages, even while they long for the fullness of the new. 

In the Romans 8 passage we just read together, this experience of contradiction is given an intensely emotional and visceral expression.  You get the feeling in this passage that Paul’s experience of living in-between is tearing him apart.  Yes, we have the first fruits of the Spirit, Paul says, but we still groan while we wait for adoption, and for a final redemption.  Creation itself is in bondage to decay, and it too groans in labor pains, in anticipation, of its freedom.  There is no doubt that Paul is confident in the final outcome – ‘I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us’.  He knows that the new age of Christ’s reign will soon come in its fullness.  But until then Paul waits in the time between, yearning for the new world on its way.

In a very real sense, then, the most basic Christian experience is of living in the interim.  Of waiting and watching, hoping and praying.  And I wonder if the challenge of the next weeks and months here at TUMC might not give us a profound entrance into that experience.  Like the church after Christ, TUMC finds itself in a place of transition and uncertainty.  God’s graciousness past is undeniable, and this gives us a hopeful confidence for the future.  But just what that future looks like, or when it will come, or how it will come, is not finally ours to determine.  Of course, I don’t mean to draw this parallel out too far.  As much as Gary may be loved here, there may be some danger in suggesting that he is to TUMC as Jesus is to the broader church.  But nonetheless, it seems to me that these moments, in all their complexity, could be embraced in such a way as to put us more deeply in touch with the larger sense of the interim that we as Christians inhabit.  This congregation’s experience of the in-between could be a poignant reminder to us of the very shape of the faith we confess. 

For some of us, the most difficult part of these kinds of in-between experiences is the pervasive feeling of unsettledness that haunts us at every turn.  One of the things that Gary wanted me to do as part of his supervision of my experience this summer was to work through a condensed version of the Myers-Briggs personality profile.  Admittedly, I have my doubts about the helpfulness of classifying and categorizing people in the way that some of these profile systems do, but I know they can be useful tools in reflecting on our responses to new experiences.  At any rate, what came out very clearly in my profile is that I’m quite uncomfortable with the uncertain, the unsettled, and the unordered. I want all the details taken care of, and I want to know in advance just how things are going to work.  I want to make plans and stick to them.  I want to feel confident that I am up to dealing with every contingency that may arise.  And if at all possible, I want to know the timeline in advance.  So I don’t intuitively appreci
ate the unsettledness of the interim.  The unsettledness of being neither fully here nor there, and of waiting for something with a shape and form that still remains a bit of a mystery. 

And yet, the interim time of the church is marked by a deep unsettledness, at least in the ways we are accustomed to understanding it.    In the John 14 passage that was read a little earlier,  Jesus says “You heard me say to you, ‘I am going away, and I am coming to you’.  If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I.”  ‘I am going away, and I am coming to you’.  What an evocative statement.  The paradox is teasingly beautiful.  But it’s also theologically profound.  Jesus’ presence with us involves a certain kind of absence.  Jesus must return to the Father so that he can be yet more fully present; both through the community of believers who come together at the communion table to be transformed into Christ’s body, and through the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, the Advocate whom Jesus promises will remain with his disciples forever. 

In this interim time of the church, Christ’s presence evades our every attempt to finally grasp it, even though it remains no less present for doing so.  We can’t grab hold of Jesus, sit him down, and settle all of our questions once and for all.  His absence in the interim unsettles us.  The risen Christ is indeed present, but in ways that always just overflow and exceed the limits of our understanding and our comprehension.  And it seems to me that this unsettling, absent-yet-excessive presence, is not an accidental feature of the Christian experience.  In fact, it’s right in line with the structure of the interim itself.   My guess is that one of the things that makes a congregation’s experience of the pastoral inbetween time most unsettling is the sense in which we can’t really dictate the outcome.  We can search and we can advertise, we can set dates and deadlines, but we know that the timeline of this process is finally out of our hands.  We can do the important work of exploring the character of this congregation, developing a vision for the future, and carefully discerning the suitability of various candidates, but we know that in the end relationships take on a life of their own. God may move with TUMC and its pastors in directions we never anticipated. 

We know that we can’t call forth the eschaton.  We can’t bring about the fullness of God’s Kingdom on our own.  The paradoxical interplay of Jesus’ presence and absence unsettles our desire to have it all figured out.  It disrupts our claims to be finally in control, and reminds us that the Kingdom of God is not ours to bring about.  But then, that’s what living in the interim teaches us too.  The unsettledness of being neither fully here nor there keeps us just off balance enough to remind us who’s holding the reigns of history.  And that’s why we shouldn’t take the unsettledness of the interim as an obstacle to be overcome as quickly as possible.  For Christians, the interim is the very venue for faithfulness, and unsettledness is the very means of hope.

Paul knew this well.  In Romans 8 he links the groaning of Creation with the experience of Christian hope.  I’m going to read that section again.  He writes “not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.  For in hope we were saved.  Now hope that is seen is not hope.  For who hopes for what is seen?  But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”  Jesus said ‘I am going away, and I am coming to you’.  Truly Christian hope involves that moment of going away, that moment of losing sight of Jesus even as his presence fills us.  For Paul, the hope that animates his faith doesn’t come because the old age of Sin no longer haunts him.  Nor does it come because he knows he can rise above it on his own.  It doesn’t even come because he saw Jesus during his life on earth.  The hope of his faith is most clearly experienced in the groans of contradiction, in the pangs of Creation’s bondage.  This isn’t the settled hope of an end within our reach, capable of being fully established in our time.  This is an irresponsible hope, a hope against the evidence, but a hope all the more hopeful for its being out of our control.

What confidence Paul can have, claiming that the sufferings of his present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.  But this is the nature of the faith he claims, and the nature of the hope in which he boasts.  God in Jesus Christ has won the victory.  Ours is the time until this victory is finally made complete.  Ours is the unsettled time of the interim.

For us at TUMC, the interim has become an especially real place to be.  So I invite us to take a deep breath, right now and in the coming weeks, and consider what this feels like.  I invite us to explore the contours of this uncertainty, and probe the nature of this unsettledness.  And let’s not rush past it, because it may be that as we do this we tread on holy ground.  Our experience of the interim at TUMC may connect us in a profound way with the larger Christian story.  It may help us to feel again the longing for redemption that Paul gives voice to.  It may also help us to experience anew the hope that Paul is so convinced of.  A hope in the power of God to save, even when we are on uncertain ground.  There is no doubt that this congregation will have to move on, and get to work on the tasks of searching, discerning and hiring.  Interim times must end always end.  The question is whether we can embrace the richness of this interim period in the process.  Whether we can locate the work of moving forward in Paul’s confidently unsettled hope, rather than in the fear of instability.  May we walk with the God of gracious surprises along this journey. 

 Amen.