‘B’   //   Lent 2   //   3-8-09   //   Celebration of Worship, Northside Presbyterian Church

 

Scriptures    Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16    Mark 8:31-38

 

Our son Drew has been suffering recently from what one counselor has dubbed “attachment anxiety”. This emotional distress consists of an apprehension borne of the prospect of losing a person, place, or thing.

 

Amy and I have more than a hunch what Drew’s anxiety is all about. But I get ahead of myself …

 

 

 

Such was Peter’s breathless state of affairs today when Jesus foretells his own crucifixion – cause of death: suffocation. For – like many a respectable Christian today – Peter was eagerly anticipating a life lived anxiously over many a dying done serenely.

 

But Jesus would have none of this promise of hell-on-earth. “Get behind me, Satan!” he exclaims to Peter – as in, “Follow me, you who masquerade as good!”

 

“For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

 

The human thing: Peter’s attachment to a messiah triumphant. The divine thing: something far less glorious than the cry of the day, and of this day: “Take up your sword!” Something requiring us not to defend Jesus – much less, to worship him. But something requiring us to detach from self, to follow him.

 

Something that would lead us to a whole new place: a place of surprise and discovery along our cross-bearing way. Something that would lead us … to a place called grace.

 

 

The late Gerald May, cofounder of the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation, wrote a lovely little book about a generation ago called Addiction and Grace. In it, May describes addiction as a condition of over-attachment to what God had created good – turning something gracefully provided into something disgracefully procured.

 

Grace, on the other hand, fosters love with detachment. For the very essence of that love is a letting go – a longing for what is best for the other or oneself without imposing any expectation of what that best might be.

 

For we may rightly sing of God’s name-changing covenant with Abraham and Sarah today – invoking the hallowed words of that beloved hymn, “O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go.” But we must let go of our ideas about love for God’s love to make itself known.

 

 

 

I once asked my sister-in-law if her husband – my wife’s brother – would ever retire from his multimillion dollar law practice.

 

Without looking up from ironing his shirts, my sister-in-law responded: “Never.” Not that he needed the money, she explained. He simply needed to be chasing the money.

 

In her Pulitzer Prize-winning biography The Most Famous Man in America, Debby Applegate writes,

Which is how, indeed, Henry Ward Beecher would become the most famous man in America in the late nineteenth century: not through his social prophecy, but that combined with his sexual profligacy.

 

Attachment anxiety. We need not crawl inside the skin of the Beechers and brothers-in-law of our world to know what it’s all about:

 

·        To draw our sense of self from the expectations of others – from the names others place on us -- versus the new and unexpected names (“Abraham” … “Sarah”) God heartily bestows upon us.

 

·        To be burdened by our desires – “See me” … “Feel me” … “Touch me” … “Heal me” – when all Jesus ever desired of us was to voluntarily take up those crosses, and follow him voluntarily taking up his.

 

·        To say something and wait for others to respond … so we really know how we meant it.

 

 

 

Our son Drew is experiencing a bucketful of attachment anxiety these days. And, for good reason.

 

For the only home he has ever known in his nearly 11 years – sans his first 11 months – is Ann Arbor, Michigan.

 

And now, he is moving 500 miles away.

 

With his parents.

 

 

For you see: This past Sunday, I was offered a new covenantal name.

 

I was called to serve as solo pastor of Bethesda Presbyterian Church in Bethesda, MD.

 

And, with your blessing at a congregational meeting after worship two weeks from today, I hope to be released by you to receive this call.

 

This is not a cross I wanted to bear with you this Lenten season: to begin a two-month period of saying goodbye each other that would only conclude come the end of Eastertide, the end of May.

 

But then, I came face-to-face with the grace of our session yesterday morning. Along with the Associate Executive of our presbytery, the Rev. Brenda Jarvis, and our own in-house expert on congregational leadership transitions, Jean Loup, our session – your session – reminded me, and reminded each other, that an over-attachment to this good bond between this pastor and this congregation might eventually do us more of a disgrace than a grace.

 

 

 

For there are others in the newly bustling Beltway I must love come June. And there are new leaders and new lives in this longsuffering Heartland that you must – and will – embrace into your love.

 

 

 

 

God bless you, Northside Presbyterian Church!

 

And God bless us all – as we trudge this road called adios: “to God.”

 

 

¹Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (NYC: Doubleday, 2006), p. 4.