00:00:10.440 - 00:00:24.110

before I read our scripture lesson, I want to say a word of thanks. Thanks to the senior class for bestowing upon me this honor to speak to you and this perhaps the last worship service of the

00:00:24.110 - 00:00:39.570

year. Thanks be to ted and to the faculty of this institution for creating a warm and loving place in which oddballs like me with strange senses of what's appropriate in the pulpit might yet find a home and

00:00:39.570 - 00:00:55.800

thanks above all for this student body and for this great place in which to learn and grow and be together the people of God. I am grateful beyond words and I thank you. Will you join me

00:00:55.800 - 00:01:19.310

in prayer by the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts together, Find approval and blessing in your sight. O you who are our rock and our Redeemer, our men. Every New

00:01:19.310 - 00:01:36.730

Year's Eve, I revisit a poem. It's entitled Years End and it was written by Richard Wilbur. A name you have heard me used before. He's one of my very favorite american poets. Wilbur is

00:01:36.730 - 00:01:57.290

reflecting on the last fading hours of the year. Late on December 31 as a snowfall covers the landscape of his Connecticut home. He meditates on things overwhelmed and frozen by change his mind wandering from image to

00:01:57.290 - 00:02:17.520

image across time and space. A New Year's Eve party visible through illumined windows, fast covering with frost in the deepening night, a freezing lake trapping leaves from overhanging branches that once fallen are as he puts

00:02:17.520 - 00:02:40.330

it, held in ice like dancers in a spell ferns and mammoths, millions of years old now fossilized on the very stones on which they fell in death victims of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius at pompeii eternally

00:02:40.330 - 00:03:07.050

engulfed in pyroclastic ash. And here is Wilbur's final stanza. These sudden ends of time must give us pause. We fray into the future rarely wrought, save in tapestries of afterthought more time! More time

00:03:08.140 - 00:03:29.630

barrages of applause come muffled from a buried radio. The New Year bells are wrangling with the snow. We fray into the future. That that's it, isn't it? We weren't ready for this. We

00:03:29.630 - 00:03:45.070

weren't ready for the virus. We weren't ready to be locked away in homes and connected only in the ether. We weren't ready for the year, or maybe for an entire seminary career to end so abruptly

00:03:45.640 - 00:04:08.090

with words unsaid things undone, We fray into a future rarely wrought, save in tapestries of afterthought. More time. We plead more time. But here we are in the midst of it, at the

00:04:08.100 - 00:04:31.670

sudden end of time and while the world goes on , it's perhaps not so merry way. We sit frozen in the moment of our anxiety like leaves upright , informing ice or fossils in stone or bodies entombed

00:04:31.680 - 00:04:51.190

in volcanic ash. In john's story this morning, jesus disciples aren't ready either, they must have thought some sort of change was afoot there, Lord was behaving oddly, but they have no inkling of the

00:04:51.190 - 00:05:09.750

apocalyptic volcano about to erupt and entomb the world. They love more time, they might have said, had they known more time, but there he is , in the midst of them, talking about going

00:05:09.750 - 00:05:23.180

on ahead of them to the father's house to prepare their rooms, leaving them behind to catch up as best they can. There will be a place for them, He promises and all they have to do

00:05:23.180 - 00:05:45.560

is believe, believe sometimes the hardest thing to do is believed, but on he goes heaping symbol upon figure of speech while the sudden end of time looms larger and larger and the future phrase before them,

00:05:46.040 - 00:06:02.650

until finally thomas bless his anxious literalist IQ heart last asks the question that always lingers on the lips of the left behind. Wait a minute. We don't know where you're going. How can we possibly know

00:06:02.650 - 00:06:21.540

the way I am? The way Jesus says with a poet's eye for metaphor and the truth and the life no one comes to the father except through me . We argue even now about whether one must believe

00:06:21.540 - 00:06:34.940

in jesus before one is allowed to follow the way to the father. But here I'm going to confess my heresy. You can write it down if you want. I don't care, I don't care who

00:06:34.940 - 00:06:49.350

is saved and who isn't who gets to follow and who doesn't. I don't care if anyone is saved or isn't in such moments as these in which we are living, nothing could matter less. What I

00:06:49.350 - 00:07:15.930

care about is the metaphor, something about jesus embodies away something incarnates truth. Something in flesh is life as we stand fraying into an uncertain future, hopes unraveling and dreams growing ever more distant. I suggest

00:07:15.930 - 00:07:42.450

that this metaphor is all we have, he is way and truth and life. The mid 20th century poet W. H. Auden understood this metaphor. Auden's long poem famous now for the time Being,

00:07:43.040 - 00:08:00.210

is subtitled a christmas oratorio, but I find myself straying into it at odd moments during the year. Moments like this one, Auden's title speaks the existential truth. We are trying to figure out how to

00:08:00.210 - 00:08:20.900

live for the time being. We live for the time being between the promise of christ's heavenly kingdom revealed in manger and empty tomb and its as yet unfulfilled reality. We live for the time being, hoping

00:08:20.900 - 00:08:39.130

for extraordinary blessing. While trying to cope with ordinary cussedness. We live for the time being. While the anxieties of the present fray at the edges of our confidence and hope and the future unravels in the

00:08:39.130 - 00:08:58.050

direction of despair Auden wrote in such a moment for the time being, was published in 1944, as the world bled and died in the paroxysms of the Second World War. The poems, characters are figures

00:08:58.050 - 00:09:16.140

from the ancient gospel nativity scenes. Okay. But they are also very modern people who are dealing with very modern anxieties. There's joseph waiting in a bar for his date mary who stands him up and never

00:09:16.140 - 00:09:35.250

shows, and joseph is left to deal with his own irrelevance in his own story. Wise men follow the Star to Bethlehem not as a pilgrimage of self devotion, but as a process for self discovery.

00:09:37.840 - 00:09:56.310

Liberal humanist Herod wonders that all his enlightened works will be forgotten because reason will be replaced with revelation. Auden's narrator speaks for us all when he observed near the poem's end that the time being is, in

00:09:56.310 - 00:10:16.850

a sense the most trying time of all. For despite christ's entry into the world, nothing has really changed. Here. We all are back in the moderate aristotelian city of Darning and the 8 15,

00:10:18.780 - 00:10:33.690

God knows what we know somewhere. The light of the Kingdom may have dawned, but it's still dark here where we are. We may have seen the power and pattern of the future, but for the

00:10:33.690 - 00:10:48.380

time being, we are still frozen in the moment to know the shape of the hope of the taste of the future and not be able to reach it to dwell in it, even to draw near to

00:10:48.380 - 00:11:13.880

it. That is the definition of anxiety we fray into the future. Auden closes the poem with these famous lines. He is the way follow him through the land of Unlike Nous, you will see rare

00:11:13.880 - 00:11:37.330

beasts and have unique experiences. He is the truth seek him in the kingdom of anxiety. You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years. He is the life love him in

00:11:37.330 - 00:11:56.280

the world of the flesh and at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy. Uh huh. Every time I read that poem, I am struck all over again with the difference between the way I

00:11:56.280 - 00:12:11.480

often hear jesus metaphor and the way I think Auden hears it. I think we hear Jesus claimed to be the way and I think he means the way out. We hear his claim to be the truth

00:12:11.480 - 00:12:26.410

, and think he means to give us a club to quash all the falsehoods of our time. Especially those we most vehemently disagree with. We hear that he is the life and thinking means eternal life,

00:12:26.410 - 00:12:41.530

or at least life somewhere other than wherever it is we are, but often is not offering us escape from this anxious world. He is quite the contrary , forcing us back into it on the nose that

00:12:41.530 - 00:13:01.590

in the kingdom of anxiety, with all its chaos , there is a fixed point and the point is , christ. Christ stands ever and always rooted in that kingdom of anxiety where people are fraying into an

00:13:01.600 - 00:13:24.980

uncertain future and pleading for time. More time. Aaden offers no cheap cure for anxiety. He knows that the resurrection of christ may change everything theologically, but practically it changes nothing at all. Easter has

00:13:24.980 - 00:13:39.770

come and gone. And yet here we are! In the midst of it, still in lockdown, economy is still reeling and all our Savior's medical and political political are fighting with each other for pride of

00:13:39.770 - 00:14:03.840

place at the presidential podium. And yet Aaden says , there he is too. In the midst of it, christ, the way christ the truth, christ, the life christ is the way the way

00:14:03.840 - 00:14:24.080

that winds through strange lands realms unlike anything you have been prepared to expect 41 years ago on an occasion , not unlike this. The novelist novelist Frederick Buckner spoke at my seminary graduation and he quoted J.

00:14:24.080 - 00:14:37.150

R. R. Tolkien's poem from The Hobbit. You can probably recite it, the road goes ever on and on. Down from the door where it began, Wagner was suggesting, I think that we

00:14:37.150 - 00:14:50.290

intrepid seminary almost graduates. We're about to embark on a great journey, not unlike that of the Hobbits , full of challenge and also full of joy. And he was right, of course. But in

00:14:50.290 - 00:15:07.700

ways neither he nor we could imagine seminary has prepared me, I thought. But the truth is seminary prepared me to serve a church but probably didn't exist in the moment. They gave me my diploma and

00:15:07.700 - 00:15:26.400

certainly doesn't exist now. I have served a church wherein dwell not the playful lapdogs of settled dogma, but the rare, sharp toothed theological beasts that, though they have taught me much, have also taken

00:15:26.400 - 00:15:41.700

more than a few bites out of my backside. I have had unique experiences and I use the term with the adjective with tongue firmly planted in cheek. I've had unique experiences, but they have made of

00:15:41.700 - 00:16:00.610

me for better or worse, someone I could not have imagined being. And now here I am, as if in a parallel universe to say that all these things will happen to you too. The church

00:16:00.620 - 00:16:18.750

is transmogrified, eyeing before your eyes and to walk in the way of christ is not to stroll down a smooth paved road, but rather to blaze a trail through dense undergrowth. And yet there he is

00:16:18.340 - 00:16:37.620

in the midst of it, like an overgrown but discernible path through dark and unfamiliar word, woods, a road that goes ever on and on. He is the way away, as rare and unique as

00:16:37.620 - 00:16:59.140

it is dark and fearsome, and he beckons you to follow him in that way. Christ is the truth. Truth that can only be sought with eyes wide open, willing to abandon notions you thought were

00:16:59.140 - 00:17:18.520

true because you wanted them to be some truths. Maybe even all truths worth knowing carry you into anxious places, take you far away from comfort and farther still from security. Some truths you will cling to

00:17:18.540 - 00:17:42.890

, even as others call them lies, hoaxes fake news. Some truths replace reason with revelation even when reason was perfectly understandable and revelation makes absolutely no sense . Some truths force a choice between one hope and

00:17:42.890 - 00:18:03.830

another. A greater good or a lesser love or justice. Knowledge or mystery. It is not an easy thing to seek the truth. And yet there he is in the midst of it, in the

00:18:03.830 - 00:18:23.260

center of a great city full of people with anxious hearts and worried minds. All seeking truth and all terrified of finding it. He is the truth. Even though knowing the truth neither resolves anxieties nor eases

00:18:23.260 - 00:18:45.390

worry and he summons you into the mystery of his truth. Christ is the life. And if you would live this life you must live it in the flesh with all of the weakness and limitation and insecurity

00:18:45.450 - 00:19:03.560

that pulses through your veins and bores into the marrow of your bones. Flesh you see is prone to the very worst. The world can do viruses that attack like a mugger in the bushes, Cancers that

00:19:03.560 - 00:19:22.240

proper death in the organs. Meant to give life hungers that growl in the gut and yearnings that howl in the heart. Ah But flesh is also capable of the very best the world has to offer joy

00:19:22.250 - 00:19:42.270

that breaks forth in song. Love that in raptures you at the very thought of the beloved beauty that fills your eyes with tears of gratitude for the simple gift of being alive. And there he is in

00:19:42.270 - 00:20:00.790

the midst of it like a bride groom at a wedding feast, dancing with the pleasure that only flesh can know. And the angels are forced to envy , filled with love that commits to face both wheel

00:20:00.790 - 00:20:27.530

and whoa with grace and equanimity, steady in suffering . Expansive in hope. He is life brimful and overflowing with equal measures grief and glory, and he welcomes you into the lusciousness of that life. He

00:20:27.530 - 00:20:47.980

is the way the truth, the life, that's all We have, my friends as we stand here fraying into the future. It is also, I think all we need, for he is standing here

00:20:47.990 - 00:21:06.920

too, in the midst of us, transubstantiation the hard bread and bitter gall of the kingdom of anxiety into the broken loaf and poured wine of the Kingdom of God. You will need him here at the

00:21:06.920 - 00:21:26.860

banquet table here in the wedding feast of these two kingdoms. This table which speaks to us of both suffering and hope, Death and resurrection. This table , whose fair is more meager than the emptiest cupboard

00:21:26.870 - 00:21:47.570

can prepare, and yet more sumptuous than all the feasts of all the kings of all the anxious kingdoms of all time. This table to which you have come around which you have stood behind and beside,

00:21:47.570 - 00:22:07.590

and before which you have and do and will serve your whole life long. This is where you will meet him, Where you will always meet him, who is way and truth and life in all the

00:22:07.590 - 00:22:30.450

anxious moments of all your today's and all your tomorrows , you will meet him at the table, the one who emptied of himself becomes the empty space within the heart of silence, where beauty gathers all the

00:22:30.450 - 00:22:49.940

world's deep darkness even now and fills it with the light. You will meet him at the table, who calls to you in mid nights of the soul and bids you follow through divided sees and cross the

00:22:49.940 - 00:23:11.010

holy deserts of the heart. Even now you feel the ancient fire, You will meet him at the table, who reaches out to heal the shattered ones , the dimming shards, the broken, disillusioned,

00:23:11.020 - 00:23:30.590

world weary hope long ago abandoned. Even now you see his wounded hands, You will meet him at the table, whom you know by many names inscribed across the interstices universe, or whispered in the smallest

00:23:30.600 - 00:23:52.280

breath of love. Even now your lips dare frame their sound. You will need him at the table , whom love now fractures open on the altar, whom judgment now decant upon the earth. His Brokenness

00:23:52.290 - 00:24:11.180

is rendered up in beauty. Even now, as you take bread and cup, you will meet him at the table. He is the host, and holds this space for you. You who only lately

00:24:11.180 - 00:24:23.360

join the feast and yet are welcomed into realms of light. Even now, see all things are ready