SPEAKER_00 0:53

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be holy and pleasing in your sight, O Lord, O Rock and Redeemer. Amen. Good evening. Thank you, Holy Family, for bringing us all together. Thank you, friends and colleagues, for the ways that you have challenged, encouraged, and supported me through the years. And thank you, my St. Paul's folks, all of you who cross county lines tonight, just to celebrate this new season of ministry with me. I gotta confess it's a little strange to stand before you tonight, sort of like giving a speech at your very own extended family reunion. It is a joy to be with you, with all of you in the same room with me. Now, I have been at Holy Family for just over seven months now, and lately I have been thinking a lot about toast. If you recall a moment in the not too distant past, just over a decade ago perhaps, the late aughts, early 2010s, fancy artisanal toast was having a moment. Coffee shops from coast to coast were jumping on the bandwagon, which led to the inevitable outcry against the spending habits of the young. Millennials, so the story went, were spending too much money on coffee and toast, abacombable and otherwise. Never mind crippling student debt, never mind the slowish return of the job market after the Great Recession, toast must be to blame for the young's financial woes. Now, despite this backlash, a journalist set out to find the origins of the fancy toast epidemic. He wandered into trendy coffee shops in the San Francisco Bay Area looking for the culprit. His interviews led him to a single source, a coffee shop in a far-flung corner of the city that had been selling toast years before it was the talk of the town. That coffee shop was called the Trouble, Coffee and Coconut Club. Trouble for short. Now, the Trouble, Coffee and Coconut Club had four items on its menu: coffee, cinnamon toast, grapefruit juice, and yes, you guessed it, coconuts. Each and every one of these menu items held special significance to Giulietta Corelli, Trouble's founder and owner. Corelli established trouble to be the means by which a community could gather around a single person who desperately needed it. Corelli herself. Corelli, you see, had suffered from severe psychotic episodes since she was in high school. Episodes that sometimes left her feeling unmoored from reality, temporarily incapable of remembering who she was and where she was going. Trouble was the name she gave to these episodes. And for years she struggled alone, self-medicating with drugs and alcohol. The items on Trouble's menu were the few things that she could keep down when trouble came knocking. Those moments when she felt specially unwell and unable to cope. Eventually, Corelli got sober. Eventually, she received a diagnosis that helped her get the help she needed to cope with her symptoms. For a long time, however, Corelli's untreated mental illness meant that she lived a transient life, unable to hold down a job, stay in school, or maintain the kind of long-term stable relationships that last. Trouble, coffee, and coconut club was her response to this lonely, isolating state of affairs. In the absence of strong ties to people, place, or kin, she created a community of weak ties, daily interactions with customers and neighbors alike that held her together when her life fell apart. If she ever had an episode on the way to work, if she ever forgot who she was and where she was going, she walked up to strangers and asked for help. Heavily tattooed and clad in her signature writ jeans and crop top, she was an easily recognizable figure in her neighborhood. Your trouble, right? A stranger might say. I can help you get back to your coffee shop. Sometimes, my friends, it's not the strong ties that count. It's the weak ones, the routine reminders that we are connected, that we are a known quantity to people and places that we might otherwise forget or take for granted. It is these weak ties, not just the strong ones, that hold our lives together even when everything else seems to be falling apart. Now, in our gospel tonight, we catch Jesus' mid-speech. An easy thing to do in the Gospel of John, for it turns out Jesus had quite a lot to say to his disciples, right up until the very end. Tonight he waxes eloquent about love and he chooses a single word as his theme. Abide, he proclaims. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love. Just as I have kept my father's commandments and abide in his love, I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. In the catalog of verbs we could use to describe love, abide is a strange one. It lacks the strength of feeling and the flare of passion that we often associate with love. It simply means to remain, to bear patiently, to accept without objection, to endure without yielding. Abide does not grasp. It does not attempt to persuade, manipulate, or control. It is less an action than a state of being, an orientation and mutual relationship rather than a goal or destination. Jesus is naming something important about the nature of Christian community here. To belong to the Christian community takes work, of course, but it also involves giving up our need for control, our need to mold the community in our own image, whether that's some idealized point in the past or some vision of the future that could have been. To abide in love means to remain with people who challenge our very notion of belonging. It means sharing leadership and passing the baton, allowing others to take us to places we might not yet know or understand. It means looking to the very edges of our circles of belonging, taking into consideration how our decisions, habits, and preferences impact the well-being, the needs and desires of those least represented and most affected. There may be those in the Christian community who share our particular vision, hopes, and dreams. The community includes them, of course, but its power is actually manifest in the relationships we maintain with those who do not. The bonds of affection that connect us to people with whom we share very little in common. It is these weak bonds that make the Christian community strong. Just like the hydrogen bonds that bind water together at the molecular level, H2O, strong enough to sustain life, fluid enough to carve valleys and mountains. Now, in light of this reality, the question for us tonight, for all of us, is simply this. Will we nurture the generosity of spirit required to abide with one another? Will we be nimble enough, humble enough, courageous enough to imagine new ways of being with and for one another? This process isn't always easy. This process is often costly. But in a world of silos and echo chambers, in a world where we are constantly fed that which only confirms what we already believe, this has the potential to be some of the most rewarding work we will ever undertake. The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote, he who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter. Those who love their dream of a community more than the community itself become a destroyer of the latter. He wrote these words in the late 1930s in a book entitled Life Together, a reflection on his time running an underground seminary for confessing church pastors in Nazi Germany. He lived under no illusions about the potential of the Christian community for good and for ill. Friends, will we love the community that stands right before us? Will we treasure the ties that bind us together, both the weak and the strong? Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people. Once you have not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Let us seek the welfare of the place to which we have been sent, and let us pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare we will find our welfare. Holy family, I enter into this work with you, joy filled and hopeful, ready and willing to serve, so that we may discover what God has in store for us as we abide with one another. Amen.