Here, there, everywhere

You have given all to me

To you Lord, I return it

Everything is yours, do with it what you will

Give me only your love and your grace

That is enough for me

And in the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,

Amen

I graduated from the Catholic University of America a semester later than most of the peers I spent four years with, so I was unable to walk with them as they graduated.

Their graduation ceremony was a year earlier than mine so I didn’t have as many “fans” when I crossed the stage to receive my diploma.

Still, my family was there, and I will forever be grateful for that.

In fact, while I walked that stage, I specifically recall a smattering of applause, not like the loud din that echoed echoed off the walls of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception as when others crossed the dais.

And as I received my diploma amidst that smattering, I heard my mother shouting from the distance, a lone voice still loud yelling, “Go Matt!”

I love that memory.

My mother is not usually a yeller and I felt her pride deeply.

Well, in the words of Emily Saliers, “I spent four years prostrate to the higher mind, I got my paper and I was free.”

Then I walked off that stage and thought I had my life all arranged before me.

First, I was scheduled to leave for the Peace Corps in July, just two months and some weeks away.

I was stationed in a small West African country called Guinea-Bissau.

I’d then serve for two years and three months and return home for a bit while looking for jobs in international development, maybe even get serious with the woman I was dating at the time before departing for Africa.

Everything was set.

And then, I realized I was not in the right place.

I absolutely loved being in a small town in a small country on the western edge of some place beautiful and yet, I was assigned to be an Agricultural Extensionist, someone who was charged with improving crop yields and I found that was not the right assignment for me.

And I was young too, too young to realize I could advocate for myself to make a change.

Instead, I left that place and returned home.

I lasted four months out of the two years and three months.

And four months is a long time when one is in their early twenties, home had changed in my eyes, that relationship had changed, and ultimately, I had no idea what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

So I decided to join my brother down in Florida and began working at Walt Disney World, because what else does one do when they are unsure what to do as a career?

Well, that was fun and the best part of working down there was meeting my wife.

After a time though, I began to wonder again, what should I do besides slinging sodas to tourists.

So, I pursued another career path: I worked for a couple of pollical campaigns back up in Connecticut.

That led to a one year contract with the Office of Senator Lieberman.

Once the contract was up, well, I had to decide what to do with the rest of my life so I found a job as a COBOL programmer at The Hartford.

And finally, well, I thought I found what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

I was twenty seven years old and all of that wondering happened over the course of four years.

It seemed like a lifetime.

And yet, there was that itch again.

I gave IT Project Management a try.

I did that for ten years and yet aga I wanted to do something more, I wanted to serve some thing, some one, some people, and I found a job at the Episcopal Church in Connecticut.

Eventually, after a number of things were done and knees were bent and hands were placed on my head, I became a priest where I felt a sense of home and completion more than I ever felt in my life, (excepting marriage, children, and family of course.)

It was a journey that lasted from 1996 until 2016 when I was named a nominee for holy orders, a span of twenty years for all of that stuff, those doubts, those wonderings, to percolate or, rather, to germinate.

“Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

Jesus is explaining to the disciples what is to come.

We are not quite at the point in John’s gospel where he is preparing the twelve for what is to happen, this is not yet the Farewell Discourse, but he is starting that conversation.

He is outright telling them that his heart is troubled, that the things he needs to go through will bring heartache and pain and yet, he must experience the Passion so that he might rise again.

Jesus must die a real death in order to bring all of us real life once again.

Now, what I just shared with you, my resume, in essence, is not about death and rebirth, I shared it as more of an analogy to be taken as an “as if” or a “like”.

And yet internal to those career shifts and gyrations was a sense of loss.

At the time, I felt as if I failed at the Peace Corps; failed in a relationship; failed as a political aide or COBOL programmer or any number of things, and in that failure were sometimes the death of dreams.

Yet now I look back and realize that death does not equal experience and what I was experiencing was life and life changes us.

And from all of those experiences I came to realize there beside me and with me and in me was God.

Until I realized that, I was somewhat rudderless, yes, but always searching; I was always searching for God.

It was then that I, a seed all along, had to give up those childish things, no longer to reason like a child or to think like a child or to talk like a child, I put, in Paul’s words, “the ways of childhood behind me.”

It is in the end of childhood, I was able to see clearly and to understand that for those wants and wishes and wonderings to take root, the seed in which I grew, needed to die.

Only when the seed dies does the flower grow.

Jesus did die and from his death, grew life.

From Christ’s death and through Christ’s death, we are gifted salvation.

When Jesus’ body was laid in the tomb the human husk of that seed passed away, yet from that death came the resurrection.

Though certain dreams I had for my own life in terms of a career and success never materialized and yes, even died, there was never an end.

Just a morphing until seed coat after seed coat dissolved and the root of the Christian path took hold of my life once more.

Friends, we are surrounded by death but that must not be our end, for we are surrounded by evidence of the resurrecting power of life over and over again.

We are now on the cusp of Spring, where we see buds on branches once dormant.

We are in the midst of Spring Training where the Mets are still at least a few weeks of being mathematically eliminated from the playoffs in April even though their payroll is one of the highest in baseball.

(I guess that’s not an example of resurrecting life…)

We are in a season of new things, growing things, new life growing things, and we can witness that everywhere.

We can witness God everywhere in all of that and still, even when it is hard to notice those things, even when we feel down about our jobs, when we mourn the ones we love most of all, when our fists can barely shake at all that curses us for we are so angry at whatnot, we are never far from the resurrection.

Though death upsets us to our very core, we are never far from new life.

The seed, like the stories I shared in this sermon, is an analogy too.

It is also a very true way of explaining what the Easter miracle is.

It is a root taking hold after having burst from the seed, it is a new plant flowering in the warming sun; it is the fruit of that plant giving life to those who turn towards it; it is comfort in the heat; it is the promise of return following a period of dormancy.

And still, we don’t necessarily need an analogy to understand what is to follow this time of prayer and confession, for after Lent, we witness the new hope of Jesus Christ returned.

Christ, who protects us, Christ, who sustains us, Christ, who gives us new life.

Know this friends, we are never far from the resurrection.

Amen.