(Please realize that these notes were prepared for a goodbye Communion serve to the churches where I've served for over 15 years)

Anxiety is an  issue whenever we face change. A good response to anxiety is not to meet it with more anxiety and responding to it, but to cleave to your own sense of self, your own goal. All anxiety does is to drain energy away from what we are able to do. it clouds our sight into a flurry of images, like looking out the window from a speeding train. I've been asked if I am anxious to go to a new challenge. My response is the same: when I was in high school, I lived into college my senior year instead of living in those moments. It is better to try to live one day at a time. In an anxious time, we do our best work when we try to remain calm amidst difficulty. This congregation is pushing toward its bicentennial. God was with this church at its founding in the cold of 1823 (or 1825 at Springhill). God is with us now. God will be with this congregation in its future directions.

Sometimes one looks back and wonders about impact. We've had too many funerals and not enough baptisms and weddings. I do know that I have tried to offer quality for us in preaching, teaching, and pastoral care and said as much in my exit interview with Alan Thames, our executive presbyter just last week.  We have faithfully worshiped God here. We have being of support and comfort in our time together. That is a good measure of church work: faithfulness. A pastor in our tradition does not join a congregation, only the session. We may represent the church, but the congregation is the church, not the pastor.

 

In our readings we get a full parental view of God, father and mother. Even when you forget people in the life of this church, God does not forget. Even if we feel abandoned and forgotten, God remains faithful. God remembers what we need. god knows what needs we have personally or together in the congregation.  So Jesus can say with equanimity: God knows what you need. Does worrying help at all? Doesn't it sap our energy? If we can't control it, why worry about it? Both readings point to better days. For the readers of Isaiah they faced a large promise but were uncertain about how to reach it. the answer is that god was with them and will continue to be with them. god is fully capable of doing new things for a new situation, even changing the whole of nature.

 

Recall that the Last Supper was a goodbye supper for Jesus and his friends. It has a sense of "until we meet again" more than a final parting. Communion is medicine for the anxiety-ridden soul. It is a tangible act of God to reinforce God's presence with us. That parental care, from both a maternal and paternal angle, is ours. The generosity of that God in our readings continues to be lavished on us, for us, in us. As we ingest it, we get the point that God penetrates our lives to the very cells. In Hebrew, to remember is to make the past a present reality. It reminds us that we are bound up with all lives, living or dead. We are all kept safe in the living memory of God. This congregation will always be kept alive in the very life of God. In that sense we are, all of us, being gathered up into the life of God, no matter where we are, no matter where life, or death, may find us.