When Rev. Mitra Rahmena resigned last September, and until you call your next Settled Minister, probably in the summer of 2020, this congregation entered into an interim period.  The Interim period is about change.  Interim ministry is about ministering to persons and to the institution of the church as you and it and we all together go through change.  In my first sermon to you I said, “Hello Interims!” because in this process we are all interims.

BTW, if you want to read that sermon, or any of my sermons, I post the manuscripts on my website:  rickhoyt.com

In that sermon I talked about the long life of a church as being like a moving stream.  Each of us steps into that stream at a certain point.  Only the founders of the church come in at the very beginning.  And this church was founded in 1913 so I doubt I’m speaking to any of the Founders today.

For the rest of us the church was already here when we joined.  We stepped in and at some point, further down the stream, all of us will step out.  For all the reasons that people leave a church, happy reasons or sad, free choice, or forced by circumstances, or in some cases like me, because my contract has an end date, we will come to the day of our parting from this church.  We will climb up on to the shore.  Grab a towel to dry ourselves off.  And then turn to take a last look as the church moves on without us down the stream.

So we’re all interims.  Whether our interim period is long or short most of us can’t know.  But knowing that the end point is coming, eventually, for all of us, can help us prepare.  That’s what being an interim feels like from the inside, from the point of being the interim.  Knowing that there will come a day when we must say goodbye to all this:  the church, this community, eventually, of course, to life itself.

And for more about life’s ending I invite you to join me and Michael Lyde at the Death Café program we’re offering this Thursday evening.

But there is another perspective to this fact of living and dying, to this fact of stream-entering and stream-exiting and the space in between.

It is our experience of the church while we’re in the church-stream that people are constantly joining and leaving:  hello-ing and goodbye-ing.  From our point of view in the stream, while we’re in it, strangers are all the time joining us, becoming friends, becoming beloved members, joining us in covenant, working beside us (or swimming beside us to stay with the metaphor) and then for any of those reasons that eventually might be the reason we will leave, some of those folks come to their time to leave.  They step out of the stream.  They step away from us.

The hello-ing is nice.  But the goodbye-ing hurts.  That hurts.  That has to hurt.  That it hurts is a good thing because that is the agreement of love.  When we open ourselves deeply.  When we include another person in our community of care.  When we involve ourselves in another person’s life and let them be involved in our lives we receive the pleasure and fulfillment of an experience of life that stretches us beyond the ego boundaries of ourselves alone… Yes, and…in the bargain we also accept the inevitability that there will come a time when we will separate from the one we love, and we will suffer loss.  Our hearts will break.  Our community will feel torn apart.  A piece of the expanded experience that we had come to know as “ourselves” will be revealed once more as separable.  When that stranger turned friend goes away goes a piece of us will go with them.

Every change is like that.  Which is why change is so difficult.  Change that involves the loss of personal connections, friends, family, loved ones, church community are all a species of the same challenging experience of loss.  We feel bereft.  We go into mourning.  People respond to change with different emotions and with different degrees of intensity.  But no one’s immune.  Every change begins with loss.  And loss is always hard.

This congregation has been through a lot of change lately, and that means a lot of loss.

Your minister, The Reverend Mitra Rahmena, resigned unexpectedly at the end of September.  She’d been in the stream with you for six years.  So there’s a loss.  You feel it.  A long-time and beloved Music Director resigned a few years ago; there’s a loss.  And then there was the tragic loss through the death of a new Music Director.  An Office Administrator stepped out of the stream this fall.  Some of you have been around long enough to remember when Rev. Marguerite Lovett, the previous settled minister stepped out of the stream, or when Tamara Cassanova, a long term Director of Religious Education stepped out of the stream.  More loss.  Other staff have come and gone.  You know these names and stories better than I; I’m still learning.  More importantly you knew these people.  And you’ve borne the loss of church members, too.  Lay leaders.  Friends in the church who left for happy or sad reasons, some who felt like an anchor of stability in the congregation that we just couldn’t do with out.

And then, Rev. Judy Tomlinson entered the stream as a Bridge Minister between Mitra’s last day and whenever an Interim Minister could be identified and get started.  And Judy’s ministry was welcomed and necessary and started the process of healing from loss, and then necessarily her bridge-ministry ended, I arrived, and there’s another loss as Judy stepped away, stepped out of the stream.

Here’s some feelings you might be feeling:  shock, mourning, “fight or flight”, yes?  And.  Disorientation. Turmoil. Anxiety.  Like the support has been knocked out from under you.  Maybe you’re feeling anger, looking for someone to blame.  Or maybe you’re feeling the loss is partly your fault, a lot of us do that, and feelings don’t have to be “true” in order to be felt.  So you might feel guilty.  Maybe you’re just feeling depressed, detached, or numb.  Maybe you’re not feeling anything, or no feeling that you can name.

And let’s be honest, some of you might be feeling excited, hopeful, and eager.  Some of us, in this room, don’t know what the fuss is all about and are ready to move on already.

All of that is OK.  It’s OK to feel what you feel.  No one needs to “get with the program.”  Eventually, yes, unresolved mourning can become unhealthy, but we aren’t there yet.  Go at your own pace.  And as long as you still feel like you’re going through it, you’re doing OK.  Where-ever you are.  That’s where you are.  And that’s OK.  You’re OK.

When forced to experience a change, and knowing that change requires loss, our first response is to resist the change.  The first response for most people is to minimize the change in one of two ways.

If we experienced the previous reality in a positive way, then our response will be to quickly remake the old reality as exactly as we can.  If we experienced the previous reality in a negative way, then our response will be to quickly re-create an even earlier reality that we perceived as positive.  In either case, we work to resolve our anxiety about the future by creating in the present a model that we know from the past.  Knowledge and certainty is very comforting during a time of change.  So to ease our anxiety about the future we look to what we know, and certain knowledge only exists in the past.

So for example, thinking about churches, and thinking generally about the situation of Interim Ministry that all churches go through from time to time.  Imagine that a reasonably long-term settled minister leaves the church for happy or sad reasons.  There will be some folks who experienced that ministry positively and their natural response will be to say, “Well that’s a blow.  But we’re doing fine.  What we need is another minister just like dear old Rev. Recently Gone.  In fact, let’s avoid all the uncertainty and anxiety of an Interim Ministry let’s just go find Rev. Recently Gone II and keep going.”

But it might be that some folks in the church weren’t that excited about Rev. Recently Gone’s ministry.  They never really warmed up to Rev. Recently Gone’s particular style.  For them, frankly, the loss feels a little like a relief.  For them, they might say, “Now’s the time to get this church back on the right path, the way it was before Rev. Recently Gone came in and started changing things.  What we need is new leadership like dear old Rev. Prior Minister, remember them?  In fact, let’s avoid all the uncertainty and anxiety of an Interim Ministry, let’s just go find Rev. Prior Minister II and keep going.”

Now obviously, if you have both kinds of people in one congregation, holding both positive and negative feelings about the most recent minister or the one before that, you’re going to have a problem going right out and finding your next minister the same as the old one.  Acknowledging the reality that congregations have complex and contradictory feelings about previous ministers is part of what constitutes the ministry of Interim Ministry, helping a congregation see that they probably shouldn’t assume that every church member shares the same feelings about the ministry example they just experienced, or the one before that.

So we can’t just avoid all the uncertainty and anxiety of an Interim Ministry.  We can’t.  Those two options of recreating the immediate or more distant ministries of the past won’t work.  Fortunately there’s a third way.

The future of the church lies in the future.  That’s where we’re headed.  The future is where we’re going.   That’s the third way.  Where we go from here is not back to any beloved past, but onward to the future.  We can’t go upstream, if you remember that metaphor.  We’ve got to go forward, around that bend in the river.  And who knows, what we may find there?

Well who knows?  No one knows.  That’s why we’re tempted to recreate the past.  The path of the stream once it gets around that bend is unknowable.  To keep going that way means to accept uncertainty.  Mystery.  But the truth is we’re going that way whether we like it or not.  The stream is sweeping us along.  So the spiritual work required for this interim time is to get comfortable with being uncomfortable, to accept the coming uncertainty, the mystery.  We can resist, but not forever, and resisting takes up a lot of energy that we could put to better use.  The future of this church is downstream.  To be successful we will need some courage.  We will need some trust.  We will need creativity, experimentation, playfulness, risk, all the gifts and strengths of this community that we have always relied on.  We need faith.

Though days be dark with storms

And burdens weigh my heart

Though troubles wait at every turn, 

I know I can go on.

So brothers take my hand

And sisters sing my song,

When hope awaits at every turn,

I know we will go on.

To turn this interim period from a time of anxiety to a time of hope, is to reframe this period as an opportunity instead of a problem.

The loss of one way of doing church feels like a problem we need to solve.  And the sooner the better.  When we have a problem; we solve it.  That’s how we work.  This approach works well for recreating the past.  And some problems are like this.  It’s called a “technical” problem.  If a light bulb burns out you don’t have to buy a new lamp, you just change the light bulb.  We solve the problem within the same system that we had in the past.

But when a light bulb goes out, there is, for a short period, an interim period, an opportunity to do something different.  Maybe now is the time to buy a new lamp.  Maybe, you decide you don’t need a lamp there at all.  Maybe now’s an opportunity to switch to a more energy efficient kind of bulb, and maybe the old lamp won’t work with that kind of bulb.  In this situation, instead of having a technical problem, you have an adaptive problem.  Not just the bulb needs to be changed, but the whole system of lighting the room needs to change.

A technical problem is a problem where the solution lies within the existing system.  You already know what you need to know.  You apply a tool you already know how to use.  A piece is broken but the system is fine.  You fix the piece and leave the system in place.

An adaptive problem is a problem where the solution requires a whole new system.  You don’t know all that you need to know.  The tools you have aren’t appropriate.  And when the solution appears the new reality won’t be like the past.  You’ll be in a whole new world.

Sure that feels scary.  Go ahead and feel what you feel.  But recognize also that this interim period gives us an incredible and valuable opportunity to create something new:  a new system.

We are building a new way.

Feeling stronger everyday,

We are building a new way.

I’ve been using a stream metaphor to talk about the flow of time, the life of a church.  But there’s one way that streams and churches are different, because landscapes and time are different.

If churches were like streams moving through a physical landscape, we would have a technical problem:  how to keep ourselves afloat as the stream carries us around the bend.  But churches are like everything else that moves through time.  The past is set but the future is open.  We don’t just move through our lives, we also partly create our lives as we go.  So life, including the life of churches, is an endless adaptive challenge.  We’re not just changing light bulbs.  We’re changing worlds.  We’re not just concerned with floating where the stream takes us, we’re also creating the course of the stream.  Where the stream goes from here is up to us.  We decide.  We talk and ponder, and dream and discuss.  We look within.  We listen to others.  We learn something new about our church and our mission for today.  And then we set the course for our future.

So there’s our opportunity.  There’s our adaptive challenge.  There’s our work.  There’s our interim ministry.

In the Christian liturgical calendar, we entered this week into the season of Lent.  Lent begins with Ash Wednesday, which was the same day as Valentine’s Day this year.  You might have celebrated Mardi Gras last Tuesday which was traditionally the last day that you could party and feast before you entered the 40 days of Lent which is marked with fasting.  Lent ends, 40 days from now with Easter (not counting the Sundays).

During these 6 weeks plus the four days we’ve already had, the work of Lent is to contemplate our mortality.  That’s why Christians get marked with ashes on Ash Wednesday.  “Ashes to ashes.  Dust to dust.”

I’m not Christian.  But I appreciate the spiritual lesson of Lent, which I interpret as an annual reminder that nothing lasts.  Not even us.  Nothing is permanent.  Things that have beginnings have endings.  That’s a good lesson to know.  And we need an annual reminder because we forget.  Lent reminds us that change is inevitable and even constant.  So too, then, loss is inevitable and even constant.  We will go one day.  We will step out of every stream we ever enter.  And meanwhile the things in our lives and the people we love will also in their time take their leave.

Where you find comfort in the face of that spiritual truth is part of what defines your spiritual path.  For me, I find comfort in seeing that for today, today is pretty good.  I’m here.  I’m alive.  I’m surrounded by love.  The water feels pretty good.  And I get to choose, partly, where the stream goes from here.

So let’s swim.