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Dear saints,
So it happened, yesterday I crossed the rubicon into my 50's. As far as I could tell, I'm all still here. As they say in cricket, half a century not out. My two oldest friends also turn 50 this year and we have a habit of getting on a video call on our birthdays, which we did yesterday: one in south-east Scotland, another on a business trip in Chicago and me in New York. We've been friends about 45 years and more than half of that time we have lived thousands of miles apart from each other, yet as a kind of friendship diaspora we have remained connected all these years. On this particular birthday, my family is also so spread out - from the north Georgia hills, Williamsburg VA, Louisville KY to New York City - that I half expect to find a note from our dog when I get back saying she's taken a few days break in Palm Beach. Life can so easily become widely spread and it becomes a decision to nurture those bonds of affection that lie at the heart of our lives.
Any of us who have significant distances between us and close family and friends know that the act of nurturing life together can be challenging not least because as time passes so does our sense of who we are in relation to where we are from. Sometimes I'll meet a fellow Brit also now living in the US and we'll talk wistfully about 'home' each also acknowledging that home is no longer one place. When people ask me where I am from, I can find myself stumbling over the answer: Atlanta, England, California, all the above?
All of this points to how central belonging is to human flourishing. This week, the Episcopal Church chose from its number a new spiritual leader in Bishop Sean Rowe. Bishop Rowe has called for the church to reorient itself to the stark realities of the 'existential crisis' that religious disaffiliation represents. He is right, I believe, to alert us to the urgency of the current trajectory, yet as we address needed changes to our ecclesiastical structures, we must also ask how it is we might deepen our sense of belonging to one another and to the world around us. It's our belonging to one another within the love of God that will be what fuels our desire to keep on trying new ways of being the Body of Christ. In the final analysis, more than any body of teaching or religious structure, Jesus left behind a community of people. The Jesus movement that then emerged as Christianity was an expression of belonging within which people were ready and willing to sacrifice the life they had known for the one they might share in the fellowship of the saints.
Belonging is an exercise of faith, trusting that what we extend of ourselves will be met and reciprocated; believing that when we risk opening ourselves to others we will indeed be received. I pray that you will have opportunities these summer weeks to nurture the ways by which you belong to others in your life. And as your travels bring you back to our block may you be reminded of the great gift we share together in this parish. Blessed be the tie that binds.
Peace,
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