Do Not Hold On

Here is my message for Sunday. The text was John 20:11-18 and it was also a recap of Annual Conference.

Bill Belichick, who is the head coach and general manager for the New England Patriots football team is widely regarded as one of, if not the best football coach of all time. What he is also known for is the ruthlessness in how he treats even his star players when it comes to the end of their careers. He has said that he would much rather cut a player a year too soon and still have them perform for another team, then to keep them a year too late and have them underperform for him. It’s like the disclaimer we hear on investment commercials that tells us that past performance is not indicative of future performance. But all too many people, us probably included, even if we also have a what have you done for me lately mentality, do look backward at what was and hold onto it for the present and want to forecast it into the future. Sometimes we do it because it’s what makes us feel comfortable, sometimes it’s because it’s all that we know and therefore cannot imagine something else, sometimes it’s because we are afraid of change and sometimes its because whatever it is worked for us and therefore it has to be the same for others and the same path forward.

So, for example, we had annual conference this past week, and we’ll talk more about that in a little bit, but in the opening message the Bishop talked about how important VBS was for him as a child in forming his faith that led him into the ministry and then to his current position. Now he did note that this was sixty years ago, but simultaneously seemed to emphasize how important doing that same thing now, because of how it might impact a young person today in the same way. Now I am not discounting the need to engage children and youth, although the number one indicator of whether a child will be engaged in faith as an adult has nothing to do with these things, but instead with the religiosity of their parents. But I do have an issue of saying that because something worked sixty years ago means that it is still going to work today, or should even be taking place. And that’s why I chose the passage I did for today as we think about the church and the events of Annual Conference while also concluding our series on the nots of Jesus by jumping back to the Easter story. We originally started this be looking at just a week after Easter when Jesus tells Thomas do not doubt, but today we go back to the original resurrection appearance.

Mary goes to the tomb on Easter morning, although unlike some of the other stories she is not there to prepare the body for burial, she is apparently just going there to be near the tomb in order to mourn, although that’s speculation on my part. And then skipping overseeing the tomb open and telling others, because that’s not the focus, and jumping to the end where Mary encounters the risen Christ. She is crying, and then sees Jesus, but doesn’t know it is Jesus until he calls her name. Now in Matthew, when she recognizes that it is Jesus, she bows down in worship and grabs ahold of Jesus’ feet. Although Jesus says to her, do not hold onto me, we are not told that she has grabbed onto him, and that could then lead to an interpretation that perhaps this is a metaphorical hanging on, either both physical and metaphorical will work for our purposes. Because does Mary come to the tomb expecting life? No. she comes to be near the body, expecting him still to be dead. That’s every experience she has had in her life, right? Resurrection doesn’t make any sense. It’s not on the radar screen. And even though Jesus appears to shape shift, or she is just totally misunderstanding of seeing him as the gardener because she doesn’t expect to see him there, like encountering someone outside of the context in which you know them, she doesn’t recognize him at first, and then when she does, she expects him to be exactly like she had known him before, and perhaps there is reason for that.

If she witnessed or heard about the raising of Lazarus or the raising of Jairus’ daughter, they were the same as they were before. And what makes their stories very different from Jesus is that they will die again. So even if she believes this is truly Jesus, she doesn’t yet understand and expects him to be exactly the same Jesus that she knew alive a few days before. But that Jesus doesn’t exist anymore and for her to truly understand the resurrection, the power of Easter, she has to understand this transformation of seeing and knowing Christ differently. She has to let go of that understanding of pre-resurrection Jesus in order to understand and know the resurrected Christ. She has to let go of that old life in order to claim a new life. She has to let go of Christ in order for him to become whom she truly needs now, and to let Jesus become the resurrection and the life. If she tries to hold onto that other Jesus then Easter will never be a reality for her, and Christ cannot truly be present for her. To gain Christ, she has to let go of Christ.

And so, at Annual Conference this week we had to discuss what got called the elephant in the room, disaffiliation, and that became how it kept being referred to. But while we talked about mourning the churches and clergy and laity who have left the United Methodist Church, what was a primary point of conversation was where do we go from here. That this is a new world for us, full of new possibilities, that we are smaller or leaner, but that we can have a new focus and determination to be better. To learn and grow and focus on making the main thing the main thing again, which is to be the good news to the world. And while no one expressed it directly as such, what I kept thinking about because of this message, was that to claim this new reality, to be this new vision of church, that we have to hear this injunction: “do not hold onto me.” Or to put it into Frozen language we have to learn to let it go. If we try to hold onto the way things used to be, and the old model of church, and the old United Methodist Church, we will never move forward. If all we do is to talk about what we have lost and mourn that, then we can never see what might be gained and we can never move into a new future. To be an Easter people, to witness a resurrection, to be transformed and renewed and reborn then we cannot hold on. We have to learn to let it go. We have to learn to see and be new things in order for new things to come to fruition.              

When I was seeking an appointment to come back to New Mexico out of the New England Annual Conference, I was working with the Albuquerque DS at the time Tom Nagle, whom I’m sure some of you remember, and he kept telling me to be patient which then turned into we don’t know if there is going to be a church for you or not, which got us a little worried. And so, I was talking to our Director of Christian Education at the church I served, and she said “maybe this is a sign for you and you need to let go of the idea of going back to New Mexico and be open to other places that God might be leading you.” Not what I wanted to hear, but I deeply respected Elizabeth and her faith journey, so I paid attention and even talked with Linda about it that night. And I don’t remember if it was the next day, or two days later, but Tom called me and again said he didn’t think there was going to be a church available in New Mexico, but would I be open to serving a church in northwest Texas, outside of Lubbock. And with Elizabeth’s words in my head that I needed to not hold on to what we wanted and be open to something else, and with Linda’s permission, I said yes. And I actually had an appointment in northwest Texas for a day.

I had an appointment for a day, until someone in the congregation found out that I was serving a reconciling congregation in New England, which means that we were openly welcoming and affirming of the LGBTQ community. Which 1, I had nothing to do with that decision, it happened before I was appointed there, and 2 was not all that uncommon of a thing in New England. But they then told the Bishop that I was not welcome as their pastor. As you might guess they just disaffiliated. And so, they did find me a church, or two churches, in New Mexico, and one of them just disaffiliated as well, and so that decision to not hold on, to let go, ended up really getting us where we wanted to be, just not in the way we imagined it, and I guess then indirectly led us to being appointed here. We have to learn to not hold on to old ways, not hold on to the way we want things to be, so that God can bring new life, new ideas, new things into our lives. We cannot hold on if we want to be transformed.

So much of what is happening in the church, and really in society at the moment, is this desire to want to cling to the way things used to be, to the way we knew it, to the way it was when we at least imagine in our minds that everything was better. Tat is not only not healthy, but we’re never going back there again. And so, we have to stop clinging to the past in order to see a new future. We have to stop looking backwards in order to move forward. We have to stop holding on to what was that has been lost in order to dream God’s dreams and see God’s visions. One of the common refrains we heard at Annual Conference this year was “that’s the UMC,” whether it was hearing about Four Corners Ministry and the creation of a homeless shelter this winter, and the school supply drive, which we have participated in, and the Bishop would say “that’s the UMC.” Or the new president of Lydia Patterson Institute talking about the amazing work they do, and that only 30% of youth in Juarez graduate high school, but pulling from this same population that they graduate 100% of their students and 100% of their seniors are scheduled to go to college next year. That’s the UMC. And we heard from Todd Seelau, and Exile, whom we support and have heard from here, and the 18 faith communities they currently have meeting all over Albuquerque, and none of them in churches, and the more than 100,000 meals they have prepared and distributed to children who deal with food insecurity. That’s the UMC. And it’s a church in Albuquerque rethinking their property and selling several acres that weren’t being used to a non-profit, founded by the UMC, that provides housing, training and education to move families out of homelessness. That’s the UMC. And really all of these things came about because someone saw a problem or a need, and they do not cling onto doing nothing, or letting the status quo continue, but instead decided to do something and create a new reality and are now transforming lives through these Easter moments.

And we passed a new budget and spending plan, that are greatly reduced from prior years, driven largely because of the elephant moving away and changing our income amounts. But, I chaired the subcommittee that put those numbers together, and rather than continuing to fund as we have in the past, we started every line at zero and built up from there which meant not lining onto funding these we have in the past just because that’s what we have always done, but thinking of new ways of doing things, or setting different priorities, and saying goodbye to cherished programs we have funded but no longer choose to because we are doing new things in new ways. To move into the future, to see new things, new life, new opportunities, new possibilities, to see transformation, we have to stop clinging to what was, in order to be present in the resurrections that are happening around us, because we are an Easter people.

One of the main presenters at the conference was Rev. Gavin Rogers, who is the executive director of Corazon Ministries, which is a homeless ministry, founded and hosted by Travis Park United Methodist Church in San Antonio. And he talked a lot of their ministries and how they came about, but one of the most recent was responding to the increasing number of teens and young adults living on the streets, and they began this program he said, by claiming old Sunday School classrooms, repainting and repurposing them. And those were his words, old Sunday School classrooms, because he said that they weren’t being used for that purpose anymore because they didn’t have children in the numbers they used to. And he said, even if they were still used for Sunday School it was only for a couple of hours one day a week. How effective is that? Is that good use of the building? Is it really fulfilling the mission of the church? Is it reaching new people for Christ? So now those classrooms are being used all day, every day and truly changing people’s lives, even if they don’t come to Christ. There are lots of churches where that couldn’t happen because they would prefer to cling to what was, and hope it might be again, or they want to wrap the building in bubble wrap because heaven forbid the paint or paneling might get marked up, or a hole put in the wall, and what are we going to do then. We’d rather cling to our buildings and our structures then to let go in order to see the amazing things that God is doing in the world and to participate in God’s miracles, participate in transformation, participate in resurrection, participate in brining new life, new opportunities, new possibilities, to participate in bringing about the Kingdom of God.

I’ve invited Linda and Don and Valerie to share for 2 minutes any other thoughts from conference or things that happened they want you to know about. But I want to close by quoting what I thought might have been one of the most powerful things that was said, and also one of the snarkiest, and that came from the chair of the trustees who were very, very involved in the elephant of disaffiliation. He had been talking about the fact that the churches who still make up the UMC have, on the whole, had more baptisms, more professions of faith and give more beyond the local church to other groups than churches that disaffiliated. And then he said, and the truth is if you want to truly be a global Methodist church that is changing lives and transforming the world that you need to be in the UMC, because that is the UMC. So, do not hold on to the past, do not cling to what was, instead let go and embrace the power and the movement of the Spirit that is living and working amongst us and driving us forward into a big, bold future. I pray that it will be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.

Bill Belichick, who is the head coach and general manager for the New England Patriots football team is widely regarded as one of, if not the best football coach of all time. What he is also known for is the ruthlessness in how he treats even his star players when it comes to the end of their careers. He has said that he would much rather cut a player a year too soon and still have them perform for another team, then to keep them a year too late and have them underperform for him. It’s like the disclaimer we hear on investment commercials that tells us that past performance is not indicative of future performance. But all too many people, us probably included, even if we also have a what have you done for me lately mentality, do look backward at what was and hold onto it for the present and want to forecast it into the future. Sometimes we do it because it’s what makes us feel comfortable, sometimes it’s because it’s all that we know and therefore cannot imagine something else, sometimes it’s because we are afraid of change and sometimes its because whatever it is worked for us and therefore it has to be the same for others and the same path forward.

So, for example, we had annual conference this past week, and we’ll talk more about that in a little bit, but in the opening message the Bishop talked about how important VBS was for him as a child in forming his faith that led him into the ministry and then to his current position. Now he did note that this was sixty years ago, but simultaneously seemed to emphasize how important doing that same thing now, because of how it might impact a young person today in the same way. Now I am not discounting the need to engage children and youth, although the number one indicator of whether a child will be engaged in faith as an adult has nothing to do with these things, but instead with the religiosity of their parents. But I do have an issue of saying that because something worked sixty years ago means that it is still going to work today, or should even be taking place. And that’s why I chose the passage I did for today as we think about the church and the events of Annual Conference while also concluding our series on the nots of Jesus by jumping back to the Easter story. We originally started this be looking at just a week after Easter when Jesus tells Thomas do not doubt, but today we go back to the original resurrection appearance.

Mary goes to the tomb on Easter morning, although unlike some of the other stories she is not there to prepare the body for burial, she is apparently just going there to be near the tomb in order to mourn, although that’s speculation on my part. And then skipping overseeing the tomb open and telling others, because that’s not the focus, and jumping to the end where Mary encounters the risen Christ. She is crying, and then sees Jesus, but doesn’t know it is Jesus until he calls her name. Now in Matthew, when she recognizes that it is Jesus, she bows down in worship and grabs ahold of Jesus’ feet. Although Jesus says to her, do not hold onto me, we are not told that she has grabbed onto him, and that could then lead to an interpretation that perhaps this is a metaphorical hanging on, either both physical and metaphorical will work for our purposes. Because does Mary come to the tomb expecting life? No. she comes to be near the body, expecting him still to be dead. That’s every experience she has had in her life, right? Resurrection doesn’t make any sense. It’s not on the radar screen. And even though Jesus appears to shape shift, or she is just totally misunderstanding of seeing him as the gardener because she doesn’t expect to see him there, like encountering someone outside of the context in which you know them, she doesn’t recognize him at first, and then when she does, she expects him to be exactly like she had known him before, and perhaps there is reason for that.

If she witnessed or heard about the raising of Lazarus or the raising of Jairus’ daughter, they were the same as they were before. And what makes their stories very different from Jesus is that they will die again. So even if she believes this is truly Jesus, she doesn’t yet understand and expects him to be exactly the same Jesus that she knew alive a few days before. But that Jesus doesn’t exist anymore and for her to truly understand the resurrection, the power of Easter, she has to understand this transformation of seeing and knowing Christ differently. She has to let go of that understanding of pre-resurrection Jesus in order to understand and know the resurrected Christ. She has to let go of that old life in order to claim a new life. She has to let go of Christ in order for him to become whom she truly needs now, and to let Jesus become the resurrection and the life. If she tries to hold onto that other Jesus then Easter will never be a reality for her, and Christ cannot truly be present for her. To gain Christ, she has to let go of Christ.

And so, at Annual Conference this week we had to discuss what got called the elephant in the room, disaffiliation, and that became how it kept being referred to. But while we talked about mourning the churches and clergy and laity who have left the United Methodist Church, what was a primary point of conversation was where do we go from here. That this is a new world for us, full of new possibilities, that we are smaller or leaner, but that we can have a new focus and determination to be better. To learn and grow and focus on making the main thing the main thing again, which is to be the good news to the world. And while no one expressed it directly as such, what I kept thinking about because of this message, was that to claim this new reality, to be this new vision of church, that we have to hear this injunction: “do not hold onto me.” Or to put it into Frozen language we have to learn to let it go. If we try to hold onto the way things used to be, and the old model of church, and the old United Methodist Church, we will never move forward. If all we do is to talk about what we have lost and mourn that, then we can never see what might be gained and we can never move into a new future. To be an Easter people, to witness a resurrection, to be transformed and renewed and reborn then we cannot hold on. We have to learn to let it go. We have to learn to see and be new things in order for new things to come to fruition.              

When I was seeking an appointment to come back to New Mexico out of the New England Annual Conference, I was working with the Albuquerque DS at the time Tom Nagle, whom I’m sure some of you remember, and he kept telling me to be patient which then turned into we don’t know if there is going to be a church for you or not, which got us a little worried. And so, I was talking to our Director of Christian Education at the church I served, and she said “maybe this is a sign for you and you need to let go of the idea of going back to New Mexico and be open to other places that God might be leading you.” Not what I wanted to hear, but I deeply respected Elizabeth and her faith journey, so I paid attention and even talked with Linda about it that night. And I don’t remember if it was the next day, or two days later, but Tom called me and again said he didn’t think there was going to be a church available in New Mexico, but would I be open to serving a church in northwest Texas, outside of Lubbock. And with Elizabeth’s words in my head that I needed to not hold on to what we wanted and be open to something else, and with Linda’s permission, I said yes. And I actually had an appointment in northwest Texas for a day.

I had an appointment for a day, until someone in the congregation found out that I was serving a reconciling congregation in New England, which means that we were openly welcoming and affirming of the LGBTQ community. Which 1, I had nothing to do with that decision, it happened before I was appointed there, and 2 was not all that uncommon of a thing in New England. But they then told the Bishop that I was not welcome as their pastor. As you might guess they just disaffiliated. And so, they did find me a church, or two churches, in New Mexico, and one of them just disaffiliated as well, and so that decision to not hold on, to let go, ended up really getting us where we wanted to be, just not in the way we imagined it, and I guess then indirectly led us to being appointed here. We have to learn to not hold on to old ways, not hold on to the way we want things to be, so that God can bring new life, new ideas, new things into our lives. We cannot hold on if we want to be transformed.

So much of what is happening in the church, and really in society at the moment, is this desire to want to cling to the way things used to be, to the way we knew it, to the way it was when we at least imagine in our minds that everything was better. Tat is not only not healthy, but we’re never going back there again. And so, we have to stop clinging to the past in order to see a new future. We have to stop looking backwards in order to move forward. We have to stop holding on to what was that has been lost in order to dream God’s dreams and see God’s visions. One of the common refrains we heard at Annual Conference this year was “that’s the UMC,” whether it was hearing about Four Corners Ministry and the creation of a homeless shelter this winter, and the school supply drive, which we have participated in, and the Bishop would say “that’s the UMC.” Or the new president of Lydia Patterson Institute talking about the amazing work they do, and that only 30% of youth in Juarez graduate high school, but pulling from this same population that they graduate 100% of their students and 100% of their seniors are scheduled to go to college next year. That’s the UMC. And we heard from Todd Seelau, and Exile, whom we support and have heard from here, and the 18 faith communities they currently have meeting all over Albuquerque, and none of them in churches, and the more than 100,000 meals they have prepared and distributed to children who deal with food insecurity. That’s the UMC. And it’s a church in Albuquerque rethinking their property and selling several acres that weren’t being used to a non-profit, founded by the UMC, that provides housing, training and education to move families out of homelessness. That’s the UMC. And really all of these things came about because someone saw a problem or a need, and they do not cling onto doing nothing, or letting the status quo continue, but instead decided to do something and create a new reality and are now transforming lives through these Easter moments.

And we passed a new budget and spending plan, that are greatly reduced from prior years, driven largely because of the elephant moving away and changing our income amounts. But, I chaired the subcommittee that put those numbers together, and rather than continuing to fund as we have in the past, we started every line at zero and built up from there which meant not lining onto funding these we have in the past just because that’s what we have always done, but thinking of new ways of doing things, or setting different priorities, and saying goodbye to cherished programs we have funded but no longer choose to because we are doing new things in new ways. To move into the future, to see new things, new life, new opportunities, new possibilities, to see transformation, we have to stop clinging to what was, in order to be present in the resurrections that are happening around us, because we are an Easter people.

One of the main presenters at the conference was Rev. Gavin Rogers, who is the executive director of Corazon Ministries, which is a homeless ministry, founded and hosted by Travis Park United Methodist Church in San Antonio. And he talked a lot of their ministries and how they came about, but one of the most recent was responding to the increasing number of teens and young adults living on the streets, and they began this program he said, by claiming old Sunday School classrooms, repainting and repurposing them. And those were his words, old Sunday School classrooms, because he said that they weren’t being used for that purpose anymore because they didn’t have children in the numbers they used to. And he said, even if they were still used for Sunday School it was only for a couple of hours one day a week. How effective is that? Is that good use of the building? Is it really fulfilling the mission of the church? Is it reaching new people for Christ? So now those classrooms are being used all day, every day and truly changing people’s lives, even if they don’t come to Christ. There are lots of churches where that couldn’t happen because they would prefer to cling to what was, and hope it might be again, or they want to wrap the building in bubble wrap because heaven forbid the paint or paneling might get marked up, or a hole put in the wall, and what are we going to do then. We’d rather cling to our buildings and our structures then to let go in order to see the amazing things that God is doing in the world and to participate in God’s miracles, participate in transformation, participate in resurrection, participate in brining new life, new opportunities, new possibilities, to participate in bringing about the Kingdom of God.

I’ve invited Linda and Don and Valerie to share for 2 minutes any other thoughts from conference or things that happened they want you to know about. But I want to close by quoting what I thought might have been one of the most powerful things that was said, and also one of the snarkiest, and that came from the chair of the trustees who were very, very involved in the elephant of disaffiliation. He had been talking about the fact that the churches who still make up the UMC have, on the whole, had more baptisms, more professions of faith and give more beyond the local church to other groups than churches that disaffiliated. And then he said, and the truth is if you want to truly be a global Methodist church that is changing lives and transforming the world that you need to be in the UMC, because that is the UMC. So, do not hold on to the past, do not cling to what was, instead let go and embrace the power and the movement of the Spirit that is living and working amongst us and driving us forward into a big, bold future. I pray that it will be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.