The Rev. Ann R. Lougee
April 20, 2008
Saying Goodbye
John 14:1-14

Are any of us ever really ready for "Goodbye?" Are we ever prepared to have a person of significance to us depart? Whether the leaving is a pastor's departure from a church, one's children leaving home for college, marriage or jobs; someone we love leaving her home to live in a residential care facility; or a loved one leaving from this life, I doubt whether we are ever really prepared to say goodbye.

Imagine how it must have been for Jesus' disciples at the Last Supper, when he tells them goodbye. But they will learn that leaving creates a time for learning more about trust, about faith. Jesus works all of his ministry to point people beyond him to God, to invite them into a constant and conscious relationship with God.

The disciples, of course, want to hang onto him, just as we have trouble letting go of people we love, and want to hang onto people who are meant only to be companions on the journey. As important as we are for one another, we're not made whole just by being with each other. Clergy don't sustain congregations and Christians, either. God does.

One thing we can learn with goodbyes is to trust God. So when the next pastor comes, it will be tempting to think that "the savior has arrived," but you will need to remember the lessons learned over time without a pastor – that it's the congregation who is the body of Christ, not any one person.

Learning to trust God in the goodbye time is powerful. It involves facing hard questions and examining assumptions. Will people abandon each other just because one person is gone? Does fear truly have more power than commitment and hope?

We also learn that some things are beyond knowing in the present moment, like what the interim time will bring. Part of the learning of a goodbye time is being reminded of this kind of reality, learning to trust God.

Today's gospel reading is a small part of a very long and exquisitely beautiful good-bye called the Farewell Discourse, set at the Last Supper, on the last evening of Jesus' life. In it, Jesus is wrapping things up, in a sense, with reminders and coaxings and reassurances to his much-loved, but often clueless, disciples.

There was a literary convention in the ancient Mediterranean world, in which noble words were attributed to hero figures long after their deaths. These accounts told the author's feelings about the hero, while also summarizing that person's contributions to history and telling their followers how they should live

One biblical example of this convention is the speech attributed to Moses at the end of Deuteronomy. Another from outside the Bible is the speech of Pericles after the Peloponnesian War. John follows in the path of earlier writers, including the author of Deuteronomy recounting the imagined last words of Moses to the Hebrew people.

Even though Moses' speech was written hundreds of years after it was supposed to have been uttered, the people of Israel could hear these words afresh, find themselves in the story, and understand that God was still speaking to them in their own place and time. The imagined voice of Moses was powerfully authoritative for the Jewish people, and the imagined voice of Jesus is full of power and authority for the readers and hearers of John's Gospel in every age.

Jesus' farewell speech brings into sharp focus the theology of the Fourth Gospel (in case anyone missed the message all along). We sense that he is speaking to us, in our moment, as his people: his beloved flock.

As a matter of fact, if we wonder what this last speech was about, we might go back to John's depiction of the beginning of this long evening before Jesus' death. Chapter 13 begins with Jesus' awareness that "his hour had come to depart from this world and go to God."

And here is the key to what the author imagines was in the heart of Jesus, in that very same verse: "Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end." This speech, in a sense then, is a love letter. It urged his followers, including us, to "love the way that Jesus loved."

The evening is disrupted by the drama of Judas' betrayal, but it also includes Jesus' teaching by example before beginning this long speech: he washes the disciples' feet and tells them to be humble servants. The undercurrents of the evening churn up anxiety in the disciples, and we hear Simon Peter and Thomas trying to make sense of it all. Throughout the entire speech, Jesus reassures them with words of love and care and promise.

However, we usually don't hear about the love, care, and promise as much as we hear the claim of verse 6: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to God except through me..."

Unfortunately, many people hear only that one verse as "proof positive that Christians have the corner on God and that people of any and all other faiths are condemned." Instead of isolating that one sentence and trying to twist it out of context, let's ask: What is the spirit of the entire speech? What is the author trying to tell Jesus' followers? What's the heart of his message?

When John's Jesus says 'no one,' he means 'none of you'…This is not the sweeping claim of a major world religion, but it is the conviction of a religious minority in the ancient Mediterranean world. They were a distinct people now, and John's Gospel expresses "the distinctiveness" of Christians who find their way to God through Jesus.

Most of us think that if we knew we had only one day to live, we'd want to find those people we love and tell them important things, even though we may have said them many times before. We parents would also want to remind our children of more things we think they need to know.

So, what are some things that you would want to tell your loved ones? Let's have you share some of them...

... These are exactly the things that I will want to tell you in saying goodbye two weeks from now. But I won't be able to because my emotions will be too involved. So, take from what's been shared here today my own heartfelt message to you. It's a message of love.

Just so you don't feel I've not offered any words of wisdom to you today, though, I am borrowing some from one of our contemporary great souls. Here are some words on life from the Dalai lama:

1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.

2. When you lose, don't lose the lesson.

3. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck (or we might say grace).

4. Follow the three Rs: Respect for self, respect for others and responsibility for all your actions.

5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.

6. Don't let a little dispute injure a great friendship

7. When you realize you've made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.

8. Spend some time alone every day.

9. Open your arms to change, but don't let go of your core values.

10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.

11. Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and think back, you'll be able to enjoy it a second time.

12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.

13. Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality.

14. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don't bring up the past.

15. Be gentle with the earth.

16. Once a year, go some place you've never been before.

17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.

18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.

19. Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.

Amen.