My final worship with you, at least for a few years.
As some of you know, back on March 13, when we first made the switch from in-person church to the virtual church we have created in response to the need for physical distancing during the coronavirus epidemic, I started presenting daily messages on our church’s facebook page as a way of quickly giving out information in a rapidly changing environment and also offer some words of hope and comfort during this challenging time.
Around the beginning of May, I started using those daily messages as a way to bring this interim ministry to a close and to think about how one makes a good ending.
That this interim would have an ending was known long in advance. The date, June 30, 2020, was printed in my contract since the beginning. An end was coming, come what may, but how does one, given the chance, make a good ending?
Being a musician, one of the models I looked to was music. How does music make an ending? Instead of going on forever, or abruptly stopping, like lifting the needle from a record halfway through the song (to use an out-date analogy) how does music make an explicit, satisfying, conclusive, ending?
An ending, is not simply the end. An ending is its own thing. The last piece of the experience. An ending comes at the end, but carefully attended to, an ending has its own character. It has its own time. A good ending is a presence, not an absence. Deliberate, thoughtful, acknowledged, and lived into, before the letting go.
In music there are several tricks that help make an ending. The ending music returns to the home key, the tonic. There’s a recapitulation of the original theme, after it had been pulled apart and transformed during the development section. An ending can be loud, like a Beethoven Symphony with a series of crashing repeated chords. An ending can be soft, like Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony with just a few instruments fading away into silence.
Haydn wrote a famous ending to his Symphony #45, called the “Farewell” symphony. The story is charming.
Haydn and his orchestra were spending the summer at the summer palace of Haydn’s patron, Nicholas I, Prince Esterhaus of Austria. The summer palace was in Hungary, meaning that the musicians had been separated from their wives and families back in Austria all summer long. The Prince was enjoying his summer holiday. The orchestra wanted to go home.
Haydn wrote a symphony. It is a very good symphony. One of Haydn’s best. But it’s entirely standard stuff until the very end.
At the place where the symphony feels like it’s closing, Haydn lands on a stressed dominant chord, not the tonic. And then the mood of the music changes from what had been a quick tempo finale in two, to a quiet adagio in three.
You can imagine the Prince sitting up in his chair. This is not what he expected. What happens now?
As the music continues, one by one, many of the musicians are featured with a little solo. And as each one finishes his solo, the musician puts down his instrument, closes his music folder, snuffs out his candle, picks up his instrument and walks off stage. First the oboe. Then the second horn. Then the bassoon. Each musician quietly exiting as the music continues. Then the second oboe, the first horn, the double bass, the cello. Some of them play a little solo first to draw attention, others just snuff their candle, stand, and leave. The volume gets softer. The texture gets thinner. The stage gets darker.
At the end, the end of the ending, there are only two violinists left on stage to finish the work, pianissimo.
The symphony ends.
The end of the story is that the Prince got the message, and the court returned to Austria the next day.
Our worship is not lit by candlelight. And we take our leave not by snuffing out our candles but by clicking, “Leave Meeting” on the Zoom screen.
And it is not all of us leaving today, but only me.
But it is all of us needing to say farewell. You say, “farewell” to me. I say, “farewell” to you.
Farewell means, where you go from here may you be well. May you fare well. May you be happy, successful, healthy. May your journey be safe. And may you journey in the direction of your dreams and reach their fulfillment.
“Farewell” is a wish for the future, so “farewell” reminds us, that an ending is seldom, actually the end.
We part today, but our adventures continue.
We have journeyed with each other, these last two and a half years, but it is only the journeying together that ends today, not the journey.
And that is precisely why it is so important to make an ending: deliberate, satisfying, acknowledged.
Because if we focus too entirely on the continuing of the journey, giving attention only to what comes next, and next and next, in our own journey, we risk not pay sufficient attention to the differing journeys of others. We risk becoming the Prince, enjoying his continuing summer vacation, and forgetting the musicians who want to get home to their families. We risk not acknowledging and respecting the lives that have crossed our lives, the journeys that joined ours for a time, until our diverging paths have drawn us so far apart, that we cannot communicate our love and thanks.
“We come together this morning to remind one another
To rest for a moment on the forming edge of our lives,
To resist the headlong tumble into the next moment,
Until we claim for ourselves awareness and gratitude,
Taking the time to look into one another’s faces
and see there communion: the reflection of our own eyes.”
Kathleen McTigue
I am grateful for this opportunity to serve as your interim minister for the last two and a half years. I’m glad the Interim Search Committee found me. I’m glad I was offered the job.
I enjoyed meeting you, getting to know you, serving you.
We faced challenges, expected and unexpected, but I appreciated the challenges. Challenges are not always enjoyable while we are in the midst of them, but challenges are part of the work. And I enjoyed the work.
I learned a lot. And I was happy that now and then I could see you learned something from me in return.
I am proud of what we accomplished together. I think your church is well-positioned now, for a successful settlement, which is, after all, the only real goal of interim ministry.
There is still work to do, of course. Not everything we set out to do during the interim is completed. Some work lingers. And new work will appear very soon that will also require attending to in its time. That is the truth of the continuing journey of church life.
The future awaits. The work awaits.
But today in the midst of the journey, we make an end
We claim for ourselves awareness and gratitude.
Today I take my leave.
Thank you.
(I snuff out my candle)
Farewell.