A Prophet Like You

The greatest joys in life arise from being seen and valued for your particular gifts while feeling and knowing that your fullest identity is expressed in a community identity and story.

For the last 12 years, this community of St. Paul’s has given me and my family this extraordinary gift—and I thank you all for it.

It is a gift I hope all people may experience, which is why so much of our common life here in Rome has been directed to reminding the members of the Body of Christ, and our many neighbors, of God’s love for them, and our common call to enter fully into God’s dream of a reconciled creation and humanity.

This is the community and the calling that all of you who will be baptized, confirmed, received, and reaffirmed in your vows will be living and pursuing from this day forth and evermore.

So, I thought it prudent to spend these waning moments of our time together emphasizing the pillars of our community and the story we have shared in Christ.

At the heart of our faith burns the love of God, who we know as Three in One, a community of relationships, connected and generating abundant life.

Our love of God is not theoretical nor shallow, but rather the consuming fire and compass that animates our entire existence.

We here at St. Paul’s are a community who has been shaped by this love of God, and many of us came to this church with scars and sadness because previous communities we’ve known spoke of loving God, but resisted the riskiness of surrendering fully and freely to the real thing.

Too many of us saw the great witness of scripture used to browbeat others instead of bless them.

Too many of us experienced the empty husks and unsatisfying pods of rote worship that preferred extreme forms of piety—be they overly solemn or superficially spontaneous.

This church’s core is bound to forms of worship that are authentic, and that, over time, draw us into deeper relationship with God and love of the One who has called us into community.

As years go by, the contours of this community will change, and the exterior elements of our worship may too.

But do not ever sacrifice the authentic worship of God which opens our hearts and hands to love’s living water for anything lesser.

Because once you make this love of God your primary orientation, it becomes easier to let go of the distracting idols that inhibit community life and turn your attention to loving your neighbor more fully.

Jesus continually asks us to extend our concept of neighbor beyond any preconceived limits we may have inherited from our family of origin or cultural context.

He does this because he is so connected to the source of love in God that the limitless nature of love itself guides his actions to go beyond the human borders of our social imagination.

With the love of God as guide, a Samaritan who shows mercy is the best of neighbors—a Gentile can become the conduit for blessing the people of God—and those the world considers unwanted and untouchable become friends and siblings in a common journey of faith.

Love of neighbor at St. Paul’s and in the JNRC is about honoring the gifts of our distinctiveness—the language gifts, the cultural gifts, the age, ability, gender and sexual orientation gifts that make our community rich and reflective of the larger mosaic of Christ.

We don’t kid ourselves and pretend as if building bridges across these gulfs of difference is easy.

It’s not!

But because we trust in God’s love and guidance, we gain the strength and the perseverance to keep reaching out to one another and to practice putting love into concrete action in the ways we gather, the way we worship, the way we grow together, and the way we work and go out together.

In the 12 years I’ve been here, I’ve seen the difference that living this love of neighbor can make.

I’ve seen us move from treating refugees as numbers to walking and working with them as guests.

I’ve seen us make our principal worship service more reflective of our shared languages, in order to allow the largest number of people to participate meaningfully.

I’ve seen us gather at tables in order to share meals and conversations that nurture a kind of unity in diversity for which the wider world dreams, but rarely realizes.

The same love of neighbor that we’ve sought to cultivate over these years can go even further in the years to come, if you all will commit to keeping it as a pillar of your spiritual house.

Love is patient, love is kind—it responds to being snubbed or hurt not with anger but with faith. 

Love sacrifices the ease of our personal cultural preferences for the elevation of another’s—Love risks sounding like a child in a second or third language in order to connect with another and better see them through God’s eyes.

Love seeks not to be understood, but to understand…not to be served but to serve.

The more you keep connecting the love of God with the love of neighbor tangibly, the more you will experience the rare joys that animated our forebears in the faith.

With persecutions and pain, no doubt.

But just as Christ’s last week moved from Triumph to Betrayal to Trial to Crucifixion to Burial to Resurrection—so will our personal and communal lives trace this pattern over the years.

In fact, because our deepest identity is as members of the Body of Christ, we the connected know that this pattern is always playing out among us at different points.

One rejoices while another weeps, one is born while another dies, one knows the pain of injustice while another feels the new sun of resurrection.

The gift of being a community with a shared story, rather than mere individuals, is that we can be with one another, walk with one another, and remind each other of the fuller narrative when our narrow experience of the moment threatens to eclipse all the rest.

Such reminding and accompaniment, when steeped in God’s help and grace, is what allows us to grow and live into the promise of Christ.

And our investment in such love and community is what outlasts the limits of our humanity and carries over into the heavenly dimension that we can only glimpse and imagine on this side of death’s door.

Do not ever, ever, ever give up on investing in this way of loving one another—no matter how hard the road may get, no matter how much the world may mock you for it, and no matter if your imperfect ways of doing so fall short of the fullness of the promise.

Commit this day to being there for one another in the journey—especially in these next few years of transition—so that this church community will grow in resilience and resolve.

If you make that connection and accompaniment your priority, God will be with you, providing the strength and sustenance you need to make it through the wilderness.

Lastly, I want to ask you all a big favor.

If you have been blessed by our time over these last 12 years, and have experienced even a taste of the fullness of God that we know in Christ, then go out of your way to love and support your new rector.

Give that person multiple chances over time to know you as I have—do that person the kindness of not comparing them to me but searching instead to name and celebrate the unique gifts that God has given them.

The greatest gift you could ever give me and our family would be to find ways to grow deeper with that person in your love of God, to grow stronger in your Christian witness and organizational fortitude, and to expand the outreach and inreach ministries that keep our common life vibrant and meaningful.

Don’t waste the precious time that God has given you on pettiness or regret, but instead trust in the love of God, re-member that it is only together that we know true joy and strength, and know that God is always in the process of raising up new prophets.

As our Deuteronomy passage reminds us today, “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me.”

I know this is true because of the great cloud of witnesses—the never-ending throng of prophets— who allowed the Word of God to dwell with them and announced by word and example the good news of God’s love.

Like prisms filled with light, these prophets allowed God to flow through them and pass beyond them, filling the world with rainbow reminders of God’s never-failing covenant.

Such witnesses and reminders, keep our shared story alive and vibrant, and allow the good news to transform each successive age with truth and integrity.

As we make and renew our commitments to Christ, to God’s love, to one another, and to this unique and beautiful life in community—let us remember God’s faithfulness once more.

God has already raised up, and will yet raise up prophets like you to tell the story of redemption and reconciliation for which the world and our souls long.

A prophet like you is exactly what God wants and exactly who God needs for this time and this place.

Be those prophets to one another, and to those beyond the walls of Rome in as many unique, nuanced, and well-worn ways as you can.

For in so doing, God will be with you, and our shared story of God’s limitless love in Jesus Christ, will keep marching on.