Easter 6A

Sixth Sunday of Easter Year A May 14, 2023 This week, I celebrated the 19th anniversary of my first ordination—my ordination to the transitional diaconate. (In the Episcopal church, everyone is ordained a deacon first so those of us who go on to other ministries—priest or bishop—always have that ministry of servanthood at our foundation.) So, I’ve been ordained for 19 years as of this past week, and my life as an ordained person started at almost the exact same time as my life as a mother. I was ordained on May 6 and our oldest, Mary Margaret was born less than a month later on June 4. (She likes to tell people that she’s technically an ordained deacon which is what the bishop who ordained me speculated.) This week, I’ve been thinking about all the ways that I’ve learned to love differently over the past 19 years—both as a mother and as a parish priest, about how the ways that I love has expanded more dramatically than I ever could have imagined when I first started on these two side-by-side vocations in my life. In our gospel reading for today, we are transported back in time to Maundy Thursday evening, the evening before Jesus’s death. He and his disciples are gathered in the upper room together, and in John’s gospel, he is giving them a version of what Jane Gilchrist calls “the Southern Long Goodbye.” (We don’t say goodbye quickly, here in the South, she observes, and Jesus truly lives into this in John’s gospel as the section that is known as his “farewell discourse” spans over 5 whole chapters.) In the preceding chapter 13, Jesus has washed his disciples’ feet and has told them about the new commandment that he is giving them: “that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (that’s John 13:34-35). In our reading for today, Jesus is expanding on this new commandment and what it means for the disciples to keep it. And he is promising that he will not leave them orphaned, but that God will send the disciples someone else to assist them. The original Greek word, which is paraclete, is translated very differently across the different translations. In our NRSV translation it is “advocate.” Other translations translate the word as any of the following: counselor, companion, helper, friend, or comforter. Jesus is promising his disciples (and us) that this gift of the spirit will be an expansion of the knowing and the loving that the disciples have already had with Jesus, and we get to see the fruits of that expansion in the narrative of the Acts of the Apostles. We see how these confused, frightened, bumbling disciples become expanded in their capacity for love and for faithfulness and for fearlessness and how they spread the good news of Jesus’ resurrection from beyond their small circle of discipleship to the whole world. We see how Saul, who in our reading just last week, was giving his approval for the stoning of Jesus’s disciple Stephen has now become Paul, one of the most ardent and faithful preachers of the good news of the resurrection, risking his own imprisonment and eventually being put to death himself. At its best, the whole Christian story is a story of how love helps us grow and expand beyond what we are comfortable with and even capable of when left to our own devices. And we know this in our life and loves, don’t we? Hopefully, we’ve all felt the way that love can expand us beyond anything we’ve ever imagined. But we also know that there’s always more to learn in how we love. This past week, I read an article that starts with a quote by someone named Alvin Toffler. “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” The article goes on to talk about what churches need to unlearn from the pandemic: “many of us learned that we could change quickly if we really need to. We need to unlearn that ‘quick fixes’ will ever solve our greatest challenges in an enduring way.” Or “we learned we didn’t have to do everything the way we have always done it. [And] we need to unlearn our default behavior of always returning to what is familiar as soon as the crisis is over.” The author goes on to suggest that the step beyond learning and unlearning is relearning and he suggests that “to be a disciple is to be a learner. And the church is meant to be a learning community based on the love we have for each other and for our Lord. Loving relationships don’t just give support, they help us open ourselves to the lessons we are often missing in our anxious moments.”i I love this image of the church as a learning community upheld in the loving relationship that was begun and nurtured in God through Jesus and that is sustained by the gift of the Holy Spirit in our midst! And I’ve been pondering what sorts of things we as a community of faith are being called to unlearn and relearn in this season of life together. As you all probably know, I’ve been interviewing candidates for our position that will be open with Rev Aimee’s departure to Nashville in early June. I’ve talked to a number of people about how this church loves our children and about how it is a community that teaches and supports our children but also that learns from them. (This was illustrated beautifully in Jennifer Calver’s homily last Sunday for Youth Sunday. You can read it on our blog if you didn’t get to hear it.) And I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what we need to unlearn and relearn again as a church from our children and young families and also thinking how we might go about doing that in a deliberate way. I don’t have any answers yet, but I did want to share with y’all some of the things that I’ve been learning/unlearning/relearning about all this that is helping me expand in how I love my children and their peers. Most of this new learning comes from a Continuing Education class I took last month from the center of lifelong learning at Virginia Theological Seminary that was all about what we are learning about Generation Z—that’s people who are ages 3-21 years old right now. There was also a little bit of teaching in there about Generation Alpha, who are 0-3 years olds, and the parents of these two generations which are the generation known as the Millennials. (I’m Gen X, in case you’re wondering, but I’ve got a younger brother who’s a millennial.) What this class taught about Generation Z (ages 3-21) was fascinating! They are a generation who has only ever known life with social media and our current level of technology (virtual world natives whose full life is documented on social media). They are known as the new culture creators, and they are the most diverse generation in history. They are racially diverse (split 50/50 between white people and people of color), and that diversity also is expanded to include sexual orientation. And before I say this next part, I need to appeal to the love I have for you and the trust that I have in y’all. You have helped me expand in my understanding of what it means to love and be loved by a parish, and part of that love means for me to say this out loud here in this place in this moment because I believe that we all need to hear it, even though it may be difficult, as a part of the learning that we do together here as a community of faith. In these interviews I am having to fill our soon-to-be open clergy position, I am being asked if we’d be open to gay or lesbian clergy. I’m being asked how/if we would welcome a clergy person with a non-binary or trans child. And this isn’t surprising given what we are learning about generation z. One of the speakers for that continuing ed training I took said this to those of us who were learning: “Gen Z is looking to see if your ministry values diversity. They want your values to be pronounced. They want to know how we explain our feelings on diversity. Gen Z as a whole doesn’t trust religious institutions, even though they are deeply spiritual and spiritually hungry. They don’t think religious institutions are transparent and they worry that they can’t bring a friend with a minoritized identity to church with them because of how we might treat them.” ii This is talking about the Big C church, and yet, I can’t help but wonder how our children here would answer if we asked them about this? My own children are helping me expand in my understanding of what it means to love as they are moving into upper teens and young adulthood. They each have a very diverse group of friends which includes people from different races and friends who are non-binary and transgendered. I have dear friends who are parenting non-binary and trans kids. It has not been easy for any of us to learn about this, and yet, learning for us has been a form of loving. You know, I really didn’t want to preach this sermon today. I wanted to give y’all something nice to talk about over Mother’s Day brunch. I even asked God to give me something else to preach, and you know what God did. God reminded me of one of our Wednesday healing congregation, who has shared with us how conversations with a young friend who is wrestling with her faith have opened the door for our church member to wrestle with her own faith and to even expand in how she understands love. She’s been so brave, and I am so thankful for how she has shared that with us. I hope I can be so brave. I hope we all can be so brave here together. i. https://pres-outlook.org/2021/11/what-does-the-church-need-to-unlearn-from-the-pandemic/?fbclid=IwAR296B8Ea4uINqu1Ng1IswXCEwPXe2g1HPYkpB9cGZSl5UopclDBjFrTpK4 ii. From my notes from the presentation by Kevin Singer from Springtide Research from the Gens Z and Alpha webinar from TryTank and the Center for Lifelong Formation at Virginia Theological Seminary