Good morning! I am Mary Thorpe, Director of Transition
Ministry for the Diocese of Virginia. It is my privilege and pleasure to work
with your leadership as you begin the journey toward your next rector. I have
met with your vestry and your staff, and once the search committee is
commissioned, I will work with them in this holy and joyful work. Consider me
your tour guide on this pilgrimage to the future! It is our hope that this will
not be a time of anxiety but rather a time of spiritual exploration and
transformation. The process of
transition is done a little differently these days from when you called Randy
Hollerith, and that is because the world is a little different than it was
sixteen years ago. In fact, you know that the world is very different. The ubiquity of internet, the loss of the
assumption that everyone goes to church on Sunday mornings, the culture that
seems to devalue our Christian beliefs – all of these are shifts that were not
present when you called your last rector. Time, too – we are so much more
impatient than we were before! Remember faxing things? Now that isn’t fast
enough – they must be transmitted in nanoseconds. And so with a changing world,
our work together in parish transitions has changed as well, more oriented to
the unique qualities of each parish, more flexible, with more parish input in
the design of the process. Our new approach has been used successfully in many
parishes in this diocese, from Christ Church Alexandria to Christ Church Glen
Allen, from St Paul’s Hanover Courthouse to St Paul’s King George, from St
James the Less Ashland …now…to St James in Richmond. We look forward to sharing
the work with you all.
But in the meantime, we are still the church in this
community and in this beautiful building. We are still the church in the
spiritual formation programs, in the music, in the worship, in the incredible
outreach to help others. And the Gospel still speaks to us as it has across the
centuries. So let’s turn toward that Gospel we just heard and spend a few
minutes with it.
I’ll begin, though, with something that is not in the
Gospel. It has been a surprising phenomenon over the past two years: a thin
little book, written in whispery little girl prose by a Japanese woman named
Marie Kondo, has been sitting on the New York Times best seller list for a
year. Its name? The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.
In it, Kondo lays out her organizing plan, decluttering your
home by the removal of all things that do not spark joy. You’re supposed to
gather all your clothes in one gigantic pile, and go through them one by one.
Touch each one. If it doesn’t spark joy, toss it, either by donating it if it
is still usable or by consigning it to the dump if it is too ratty.
The underlying thesis is one that we probably could all
admit: we have way too much stuff. And every day, we are encouraged to acquire
even more stuff. I will own that I like retail therapy as much as the next
person, and if I’ve had a hard week, I’m tempted to go shopping, especially if
there are sales in the stores I most enjoy.
I’d like to think that I keep my clothing, at least, at bay
by sorting through them with each change of seasons. We live in an old house
with small closets, so come spring, I put the winter clothes in storage and
hang the spring and summer ones, and in the fall, I put away the lightweight
garments in favor of the woolens. Anything I haven’t worn gets donated or
tossed…mostly. I have a hard time disposing of shoes and scarves, and
unfortunately my closet looks like it. So maybe I’m a little like the acolytes
of Marie Kondo, imperfect at tossing my excess stuff, but working on it.
You’re also supposed to do that with books, which to me is
like getting rid of children, and kitchen gear, which to me is like lopping off
a limb, and so on, decluttering your house until it achieves an Orientally
spare and spacious aesthetic. Good luck with that.
We do have a rule in our house that nothing comes in the
door unless something else goes out, be it a new small appliance or a pair of
boots, but the rule seems to be ignored on a regular basis, which is why my
stash of yarn continues to grow and my husband’s collection of tools seems to be
procreating in the basement.
Stuff. We do love our stuff. It’s comforting, having that
stuff. For my mother and other children of the Depression, it could rise to
near hoarding levels, because they suffered through the time when they had next
to no stuff. They would no more throw out a rubber band as spend money on a
book they could borrow from the library, because that would be wasteful! We of
younger generations, though, want what we want when we want it, and my goodness, we do accumulate it and want even
more. We’re blessed with the abundance of being able to get even more stuff.
And that is not only a 21st century phenomenon: look
at the Gospel. A man asks Jesus to tell his sibling to share the family
inheritance with him. In that culture, the eldest inherits it all, so younger
siblings must fend for themselves or rely on the generosity of the eldest son
to help them. And apparently this man’s big brother is not inclined to share.
We don’t know the backstory here: was the younger sibling a wastrel or a jerk? Was
the elder brother always the greedy one?
We’d like to know the whole of the family story, but we
don’t get that. We get a parable from Jesus instead: a rich landowner has an
abundant crop, and rather than giving his abundance away, he builds bigger
silos so he can hold onto his surpluses. He’s feeling very pleased with
himself, isn’t he. But God comes to him in a dream and says “you think you’ve
got it all figured out, but you die tonight and you can’t take that surplus of
crops and goods with you. How did that whole plan work out for you?”
In other words, the follower of Christ can’t hang on to
stuff, particularly the excess stuff. Whether it’s clothing, money, or
privilege, God demands that we share, that we declutter our souls of that which
distracts us from the one true thing: Almighty God. Stuff isn’t true comfort.
Only God is what salves our souls.
Now, I imagine that this makes many of us a little
uncomfortable, we people who live comfortable lives and who have retirement
plans and a few too many pairs of shoes. What are we supposed to do?
Well, if
I’m more worried about the year over year growth of my 401K or whether I can
afford a trip to Europe next year than I am worried about young people in
Gilpin Court who think the only option for success for them is through illegal
activities, I’ve got some soul decluttering to do. I’ve got excess baggage to
get rid of. And that is never easy to do, just like jettisoning my extra
scarves and shoes. I’ve got to force myself to let go of the things that
distract me and focus on that which God requires of me. I’m still working on
that.
There’s another kind of excess baggage that is even more
difficult to release: the past. In many parishes in transition, the past is the
golden memory of simpler times or the rector we all loved best.
We rarely remember
some of the challenges of the past. And I expect even here, in the marvelous
parish where so much has been working so very well, the one or two memories of
a time when you were unhappy with something Randy Hollerith did is rapidly
fading into the most distant corner and he is rapidly achieving saintly status.
Not the he’s not deserving of praise: St James, under his leadership, has
become an iconic faith community which lives deeply and richly into its name, a
place of Doers of the Word.
But Jesus calls us to live forward to bring God’s reign to
earth, and the doing of the Word is not a one-time thing. So as St James
prepares for the next chapter in its existence, part of our work is to name
what of our possessions and traditions we carry forward, what we build upon
into something fresh, what we honor and lay to rest as part of the past. There’s
no room in the closet for that new pair of shoes if we’re not willing to give
away or throw away the ones that have no more life left in them.
So the challenge is the same one that Our Lord made to the
complaining sibling: your stuff is only stuff, after all. Your baggage weighs
you down. What are you willing to discard? What are you willing to repurpose in
fresh ways? What are you going to build upon, so that you can continue to be
what Randy helped you become, and who will the person be who will bring
different gifts so that you might do that? That’s not just hiring any person
with a collar and a warm smile, it is the hard work of discernment and prayer.
Your Search Committee will do that work, but they will not do it alone. Each
and every one of you who loves St James will be called upon to share ideas,
hopes, dreams, and worries. Each and every one of you who loves St James must
soak this process in prayer. If it is simply an exercise in hiring it will
fail. But if it is a spiritual journey to seek God’s will – and make no
mistake, God already knows whom your next rector will be – you will discover
what God has in mind, and all will be well.
Know that your Bishops pray with you and for you in this
time of change, and your diocesan staff stands at the ready to assist you. We
bring our expertise and experience of supporting more searches than you can
imagine – forty, currently. You bring open minds, keen ideas, and discerning
and prayerful hearts. God is waiting to show his rich love for you if you listen, tidy up, and keep at being doers of the Word.
Amen.
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