Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
June 22, 2008
Deacon Richard Buhrer
“Almighty and everlasting God, I, Richard Albert Dismas John Mary Buhrer, understand how unworthy I am in your divine sight, yet I rely on your infinite goodness and mercy and I am moved by the desire to serve you. In the presence of the most Blessed Virgin Mary and the entire heavenly court, I vow to Your Divine Majesty perpetual chastity, poverty and obedience in the Society of Jesus; and I promise to enter that same Society to live my life in it forever. I understand all these things according to its Constitutions of that same Society.”
“Therefore I humbly beg Your Infinite Goodness and Mercy, through the blood of Jesus Christ, to deign to receive this holocaust in an odor of sweetness; and that just as you have given me the grace to desire and offer it, you will also give me the abundant grace to fulfill it.”
I said those vows in the secret of my heart at Mass on August 15, 1971, and publicly a year later. This is just one of the many promises I have made in may life that I have not been able to keep. I was in fact not given “the abundant grace to fulfill” this promise. God had another purpose in mind for me, one that demanded as much obedience as my religious vows and an even greater faith than I was capable of, at the time I took those vows.
I have more of a Benedictine than a Jesuit heart. I long for stability in my life. During the time I lived in the Society of Jesus, I lived in five cities in ten years and that is not counting the fact that I usually spent the summers in a different place than the school year. I felt that my heart was continually torn open by leaving people behind that I loved. And when I left the Society it was like conducting my own funeral over and over during the course of the month or two it took me to say goodbye to each of the men with whom I had spent a decade of my life and whom I loved and still love very much.
It’s interesting to review the Islamic sources about this story of sending Hagar and Ishmael away into the desert. There is no rancor in the accounts in the Qur’an. Abraham did not want to lose his first born son, did not want him to die abandoned in the desert. As Genesis puts it: “The matter was very distressing to Abraham on account of his son (Ishmael).” 1 Abraham loved his firstborn son. When God promised (yet once more) a son through his wife Sarah, “... Abraham fell on his face and laughed, and said to himself, ‘Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?’ And Abraham said to God, ‘O that Ishmael might live in your sight!’”2According to the Hebrew and Christian tradition, God said no to that prayer and excluded Ishmael from inheriting the covenant of Abraham. But God said to Abraham, ‘Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of your slave woman; whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named for you. As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring.’” 3 Muslims count Ishmael as the ancestor of the the Arabs and of the Prophet Mohammed. In the Hajj, the great pilgrimage to Makka, Muslims reenact Hagar’s frantic running to and fro trying to find water for her beloved son.
We are continually called to release our connections to people who are important to us. I have begun to learn this lesson but I don’t feel like I am a very good example of how to do this. Sometimes I have felt that my heart is clotted closed by all the the knots that bind me with regret and longing for people whom I have loved and lost in my life and that there is no room left to welcome in the love and companionship that I long for in the here and now. We all carry the detritus of relationships that have failed; lovers whom we have been abandoned or who have abandoned us; children who have grown into flourishing adulthood and no longer need us as they once did; and friends who were once woven tight into the fabric of our lives but who have fallen away because of the wear of time and distance and (in my case, at least) the inability to sustain the connection.
This happens in churches as well, congregations mourning the loss of clergy they have loved, or worse, unable to forgive and release the memory of clergy with whom they have been in conflict. These phantom priests virtually haunt the congregations they have served. The converse is true and there are bishops, priests and deacons who carry perpetual grief and wounds and resentments of the people whom they have left behind or who have failed to welcome and support them. And this does not even reckon with the continual ebb and flow of laypeople in and out of the circle of our lives in this assembly.
In the course of this liturgy of the Eucharist, priest and people say the words “for ever” or its equivalent about seven times. I was surprised when I counted them that it was so few--it seems to me that we are always, repeatedly, almost continually saying “for ever.” And yet, I, at least, have said either “for ever” or “never” so many times in my life, only to later realize that I had not told the truth, have had to renege on the commitment, let go of someone and leave them to the mercy of God as Abraham had to release Hagar and Ishmael to the mercy of God.
Whereas Christians emphasize eternity in our thought and prayers, Buddhists affirm the impermanence of all things: “‘Decay is inherent in all component things,’ declared the Buddha and his followers accepted that existence was a flux, and a continuous becoming.” 4
It’s not that one or the other is true. I believe that both positions are true at the same time. In this life, immersed as we are “among the swift and varied changes of the world,”5as the Prayer Book puts it, nothing is permanent--Paul says here we have no lasting city; Jesus says that among the children of the resurrection “there is neither marrying or giving in marriage”--nothing, absolutely nothing lasts forever on this side of the pale.
The willingness of Abraham to trust God to care for his beloved son, Ishmael, enabled him to surrender Ishmael and his mother to the seemingly merciless care of the deep desert. There, God caused water to gush forth to sustain them as he would later do for the people Israel in their wandering in the desert. We are all wandering in the desert in this life, ever anxious as Hagar was, to find water to sustain the ones we love. Yet we are called, like Abraham, to trust that God will care for them in our place and to accept separation as the normal conclusion of all relationships. In the gospel of John, Jesus stands up during the Feast of Tabernacles in Jerusalem and proclaims “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer's heart shall flow rivers of living water.’”6 These springs of water flow out “of the guts” (a better rendering of the Greek) of each believer and they surround us as we wander like Hagar and Ishmael and the children of Israel, ever ready to open for us and for the ones whom we have loved and can no longer be with. The desert does burst forth into blossom for us on our pilgrim way, not always on our schedule, not soon enough to spare us anxiety and grief, but bloom it does by the grace of God.
When we die and enter the life to come, we will dissolve into eternity, leaving time and change and separation behind us to bask forever in the glorious light of Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the company of the saints and angels. In the meantime, however, as painful as it is, we are called to ever love and let go, embrace and release, cherish and surrender.
