At the end of each day of creation, according to Genesis, God looked at what God had made and pronounced it good.  It’s healthy to take pride in good work. And even if we haven’t done all, or the best, that we could, it’s still important to make an end, and a rest, before we start again.

With our Music Sunday, two weeks ago, and our annual Religious Education Sunday last week, we have come to the end of another church year, sort of.

Next year’s budget is passed.  The new Trustees have been elected.  The church’s committees and teams are having their organizing meetings to put together the programs for the coming church year.  We’re looking at the calendar, and making plans, and recruiting new team members, and thinking about what we want to do, what we should do, and what we have the capacity to do.

Because the old fiscal year ends on May 31, and the new fiscal year begins immediately on June 1, we go straight from one year’s work to the next, with only a single click of the clock separating one from the other.  There’s already a lot of forward energy in the church:  plans and goals and hopes and visions.  Where are we going to go?  What are we going to do?  How are we going to get there?  How are going to get it done?

But though the new fiscal year has already begun, the church year is not yet done.

The church operates under several different calendars simultaneously.  The fiscal year, meaning the legal year, the budget year, the governance year, starts on June 1 each year.  But the church year, which is also the liturgical year (meaning the year that organizes the worship calendar) begins on the first Sunday after Labor Day in September.  Usually, that’s the second Sunday in September – unless Labor Day Monday happens to be September 1, in which case the church year would begin on Sunday, September 7.

Last year our church year began on September 9.  We celebrated with our annual “Ingathering” worship service.  The choir sang “We Bid You Welcome” by Jason Shelton.  At the 9am hour the Wylder Spirits sang a song called, “Home” by Karla Bonoff.  It was a second Sunday so we had a special collection for the Long Beach Immigrant Rights Coalition.  Michael Kimmitt was the Worship Associate.  I preached a sermon titled, “Gathered Here, Gathered Now.”  After the second service the Board began the church year with a meeting for the committee chairs titled, “Let the Year Begin”.  And then we did let the year begin  And now here we are.

So though the new fiscal year has already begun.  The church year is not quite over yet.  We’ve still got the rest of this month, and the summer, all the way through Labor Day weekend, before we begin the new church year.  Today is Sunday 41 of 52 Sundays in our church year which will end on September 1, with a sermon by visiting minister Ken Collier.

But though the next church year has not yet begun, this old church year is definitely ending.  We had our Music Sunday.  We had our RE Sunday.  The church year isn’t over, but the energy is shifting.  It feels different.  The summer feels different.

It is the rhythm of the church year that the summer months are not the same as the months of fall, winter, and spring.  Yes it’s hotter.  Yes the schools are out.  Yes, there’s still a sense in our culture that summer is the season for easing up and planning vacations.

And thank God for that.  Because we need in the cycle of the year, some time for easing up and vacating.  We need to acknowledge that our lives cannot always be producing and growing and making and building and striving and working.  We need the natural rhythm of pulling back and slowing down and sometimes, even, we need to stop and put our feet up.  And if the heat of the summer, and the school schedule helps us do that, that’s all to the good.

So the summer will be different.  But as we move into the different energy of the summer, I want you to remember that the time we are moving into is still part of the church year.  This church year.  It is the ending part before the new one begins.  The summer months aren’t negative space between two church years.  The summer months, and the summer feeling, is how we end our church year.  It is spiritually important to recognize that the rest we take after a period of work, is a necessary part of the work.  The rest from work is as important as the active part of the work.  Our church year is three seasons of work and a season of rest; not three seasons of work and then nothing.

So unlike the fiscal year, which clicks over from May 31 to June 1 with no pause between, in the church year, we have a regularly scheduled time each year to include the pause, and the rest.  Between RE Sunday in June and Ingathering in September we do the spiritual work, of doing no work.  We do the spiritual work of reflecting on what we have done, before we do more.  We make an ending before we start a beginning.  And even more, between the ending and the beginning we take a month or so, in July to be conscious of our need for rest, for Sabbath, for unprogrammed time, for emptying, for breathing out, for mere fun, for vacation.  And then in August, before we actually begin, we prepare to begin, by doing the things that will help us make a good beginning when we get there.  The ready-ing and setting before the going.  The planning.  The studying.  The gathering of resources.  The organizing.

So to help us begin to make an ending, I want to start this morning by looking at the beginning, the very beginning.  I’m talking about the beginning of everything, the way it is imagined mythically in the Bible.  Genesis, Chapter One.  Verse One.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

Those are the first words of the Bible, the Jewish and Christian scriptures, in an English translation called the New International Version.  In Hebrew the book is called “Bereshit” which is the first word of the first sentence, meaning “In the beginning”.  The word Genesis is a Greek word that means “origins.”  The same root as our English word “generations.”

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

God commands light to appear.  And then when there is light, God names it as good.

It seems that there are two necessary parts of the act of creation.  There is the making of the thing, and then there is the regarding of the thing.  The artist steps back from what he has made to see how it looks from a different perspective.  There is the calling forth and then there is the reflecting on what has come.  There is the doing, and then there is the walking away from the doing, taking a break and coming back later with fresh eyes.  There’s the act of creation and then, almost as though the creator were not entirely responsible, the objective judging of the work, “Hey, look what happened!”  And, “That’s good.”

And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it.  And it was so. God called the vault “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.  And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good.

After each act of creation, God steps back to see what happened.  At the end of each day, God finishes the work and then reflects on the work completed.  And after each thing appears we are told, “God saw that it was good.”

The light is good.  The land and the seas are good.  The work of the third day is plants and trees, all good.  The fourth day is sun and moon and stars, all good.  The fifth day is creatures of the seas and the birds in the air:  all good.  (That’s a lot of work for one day, if you think about it).  On the sixth day all of the creatures of the land, also, all good.  And finally, at the end of the sixth day, the last of creation, God creates human persons.

In this version of the creation myth God makes all people, male and female, all at once, not a single man and then a single woman.  And then he gives them (all humankind) some special instructions:  be fruitful and multiply, rule the earth and subdue it.  He also creates humankind to be vegetarian, vegan actually, and every other animal, too.

And then the story ends like this:

“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.”

“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”

The final act of creation is not to right away go onto the next thing and make more things, but to look back on what was already made, and to call it good.  To reflect.  To take a breath.  To take a pause.  To take satisfaction in the creation.  To honor, to celebrate, to appreciate what is, rather than immediately turning to what’s coming up next.

To say, “grateful, take the good I find, the best of now and here.  I break my pilgrim staff, I lay aside the toiling oar; the angel sought so far away I welcome at my door.”

So, though we have, already begun the work of planning the next church year, we must also realize that we aren’t fully done with the church year we’re in now.  We’ve got more than two months still to come.  And some of the work we have yet to do this year is to make an ending.  To reflect on the year past.  To step back to see what we have done.  And to call it, good.

We’ve had a year of Sunday worship.  Forty-one, Sundays so far.  I preached most of them.  James Ford preached earlier in the year.  We’ve also had guest ministers like Anne Hines, and Greg Boyd, and Samantha Wilson, and Robin Stillwater.  We’ve had good lay preaching from Joanna Messer Kimmitt, and Michael Kimmit, and Lee Salazar, and Phibin Ny and Kevin Ford.  Roy Lansdown preaches to us next week.  Eduarda Diaz Schwarzbach led a moving Dia de los Muertos service.  We had a holiday cabaret in December.  Remember?

We had a service Auction that raised more money than we expected.  And it was good.

We had a St. Patrick’s Day Party to kick off our Stewardship Campaign, and it was very good.  And we met our goals for member pledging.  That’s good.

We more or less balanced our budget for the second year in a row.  That’s good.  We have a great set of folks set to serve as your Trustees in the coming year, as well as an excellent Search Committee in place.  The Leadership Development Committee facilitated an extensive program called Harvest the Power last year and is gearing up to offer the same program again next year in a slow-moving strategy to strengthen the leadership culture of the church.  That’s good.

The Music and Arts Committee put together a spring concert series that was highly successful both in quality, and attendance, and income.  That’s good.

Your new music and membership and religious education professional staff all got through their first year successfully:  learning on the job, keeping up with expectations from the past, and bringing in some new ideas and energy.  That’s good.

Recovering from the water leak and refurbishing the church office turned out to be a year-long job.  Our facilities volunteers managed that process well and helped us create a better-looking and more efficient office space.  And I see that it was good.

We hosted a District Assembly and it was very good.

We provided religious education for children, and game nights, and discussion groups, and art shows in Wylder Hall and picnics on the lawn.  We raised money for organizations in the community and scholarships for “Dreamers”.  We provided pastoral care, and hospital visits and memorial services for church members that died during the year, and we welcomed new members to the community and so on and so on.  Such is the life of a church.  And all of it, including the events I forgot to mention, were good.  Were very good.

Now when I say, “good” don’t misunderstand me.  I don’t mean good in the sense that everything was perfect.  I don’t mean good meaning we should look back with nothing but pride and nothing to learn.  I can think of instances that were less than “good” in that sense.  I’m sure you can, too.  I made mistakes.  Maybe you did, too.

But what I mean by “good” is that we had a year where we contributed the experiences of our lives which had the effect of moving creation forward, toward that “vision of an earth made fair, with all her people one.”

“For all that is our life, we come with thanks and praise.”  You might have failed in part.  I fail sometimes.  And sometimes I catch myself slipping backward into patterns that are unhealthy for me, or actions that are unhelpful or harmful to others.  Those days are hard to call, “good.”  We might even have failed spectacularly, although I hope not often.

But when those un-good experiences are held against a vision and judged to fall short, the mere fact that we have a better vision and can see the difference between our best vision and our less-than-the-best reality is a sign of hope.  And then, with one step back we recommit to taking two steps forward, and in the totality of our experience, both the missing the mark, and the healing of the hurt caused, and the taking aim a second time with a keener eye and surer hand, we can look back, with the perspective of a year and say, “OK.  Not perfect. But OK.  Good.”

We are not gods.  We are human beings making our personal journeys of growing and learning even as we contribute to helping the whole of humanity learn and grow.  “For the sun and the moon which we did not create… we lift our hearts today.”  That we are not the sole creators of this church, or really of very much of anything in our lives, we can be grateful.  Because where we fall short, someone else is there, some partner in creation, who can do what we cannot do, who can pick up what we have dropped, who can hold us accountable when we fail to see our own shortcomings.

So with that caveat in place, I can look back at this year in our church and call it good.  I hope you will, too.

I know that the first requirement of making a good ending, is to make the ending good.  Whether we are ending a church year.  Or if you are coming to an ending in your life.  The end of the thing, just before the final end, needs to be the stepping back and reflecting.  What happened?  What did I learn?  What does it look like from this perspective?  Naming it as “good” which doesn’t mean that every experience is a success, but that every experience is a piece of you – and you are good.  So this piece goes there.  You set it down.  You bless it.  You walk away.  It is good.

We have completed the first part of the creative act of this church year.  We have done the making of the thing, and now we come to the regarding of the thing.  We have done the calling into being now we have a few weeks to do the reflecting on what has come.  We have done the doing, now we step back and say “Hey, look at that!”

I look back with satisfaction.

As the “day” of this church year comes to a close, let’s leave aside the need to immediately begin another day of work.  Let us take a pause.  Let us take a breath.  May we see with dispassionate objectivity what we made.  And may we call it good.