Dr. Barbara A. Anderson

                There is a running joke in our family that if a crack exists in the sidewalk, I’ll find it and trip.  If there’s a patch of ice, I’ll find it and slip.  Once when playing hide and seek, I tripped on a rock and cracked a rib.  Another time, when watering flowers, I fell backwards into a metal trash can and bruised another rib. When I requested a copy of my medical records a few years ago, I laughed out loud when I read how many different ways I had injured myself over the years. 

                On a more serious note, every one of us is injured by life, in one way or another.  If truth be known, one cannot go through life without being injured in many ways. Young, old, and in between, it’s not so much a question of whether we will be injured, but how we will respond when we are. Even those who appear to have had teflon lives do not escape the brokenness of human life. Those with eyes to see and ears to hear have hearts wounded by the seemingly overwhelming sorrow, warfare, despair and trauma of the larger world beyond our doors.  For more than eleven years, we have shared with one another, sometimes openly and sometimes in private, the brokenness of our lives and the healing God brings to us through Jesus Christ and one another.  

                Much like each person, the church is broken, as well.  In the time we have been together, we have seen that, too.  We wish the church were a perfect place, where everything is love and goodness, problems are easily solved, no one’s feeling are hurt and we are never disappointed by one another.  But the truth is that such a place will only exist when this life is ended and we dwell in the holy presence of God forever.  In the meantime, the church is just as human as we are. 

                In fact, the human brokenness of the church goes back to its earliest beginning.  There is nothing wounding the body of Christ today that the writer of Ephesians has not already seen in his own day. He writes of anger that festers in the heart, stealing, bitterness, wrath, wrangling and slander.  What a picture!  Who would want to join First Church of Ephesus?  The bad news and the good news is that even the church is broken, and it is saved only by the love of God in Jesus Christ made real by the love and the actions of each of us towards one another.  It’s not a matter of whether the church will be imperfect, but how we will respond to one another in the face of the church’s imperfection and that of our fellow Christians

                One of the joys of my final month with you is that I realize what I have tried to preach in word and deed has been received by many: that God is not primarily a harsh, judgmental God, but rather the Divine Creator who dwells within us and loves us even before we are born.  It not that God wants us to continue to sin, but rather that even while we are yet sinners, Christ has died for us.  God so loved the world that God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world may be saved through him.  Jesus loves me, and you, and the whole world.  This is the good news on which I stand, in which I live, the good news that has saved my life and yours.

                Mark Smutny and I have served God through pastorates primarily in three churches: Dayton, Ohio, Troy, New York, and Pasadena, California.  I have special items that I cherish from each of these periods of my life.  Each of them has been broken or chipped, and yet you couldn’t pay me enough for me to part with any of them, any more than I would give up the broken and healed parts of life that we have shared together since 1998. 

                From Dayton is a porcelain dove from the congregation in Dayton.  Its broken leaf is hidden unless you know where to look for it.  From Troy, a largely Italian city, is a pasta bowl, broken during its maiden dinner, but glued together and still usable after all these years.  From Pasadena, so near our Southern neighbors is a coffee mug Mark and I bought in Mexico when we celebrated my fiftieth birthday.  It too, is chipped and glued back together.  And from a friend in this congregation, a cross made of a rifle shell by a church in Liberia following the civil wars there.  It is both a symbol of Christians’ working together with God to bring good even from horrible evil, and a symbol of the international experience of this congregation. 

                In the face of our brokenness as persons and church, the author of Ephesians responds that we are to respond with healing acts of love. 

“Putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another.  Be angry but do not sin.  Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.  Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us.”

                Christian love is action.  It is loving ourselves as God loves us.  It is remembering that the Holy Spirit dwells in each person, and treating each one–on the patio, in church meetings, and beyond the congregation–as though we are speaking to Jesus himself, and having an impact on Jesus himself by our actions.

Soren Kierkegaard writes,

“To the Christian love is the works of love.  To say that love is a feeling or anything of the kind is an un-Christian conception of love.  That is the aesthetic definition and therefore fits the erotic and everything of that nature.  But to the Christian love is the works of love.  Christ’s love was not an inner feeling, a full heart and what not, it was the work of love which was his life” (The Journals: A Kierkaard Anthology, ed. Robert Bretall, Princeton University Press, 1946, p. 281).

                The great 20^th century theologian, Karl Barth, wrote thousands of pages explaining Christian theology and life.  He said that in the end, however, all we say, do, write and believe comes down to the truth of a song we learn as children in Sunday School.  It’s a song I learned before I even started kindergarten, a song we sang in worship a few years ago, a song I will now have us sing together as the capstone of our ministry together:

                “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.  

                Little ones to him belong, we are weak but he is strong.” 

                In the early Christian community, the little ones were not only the children, but were all the followers of Jesus.  They were known as the little ones, “the least of these.” According to Jesus, if you receive them in his name, you receive Jesus himself.  I pray as we say good-bye that, as a church, you will hold onto this truth.  I hope and pray that, as we go into the world, we will hold onto this truth and share it in word and deed in all we do. 

                I invite all the little ones who follow Jesus to stand as you are able and hold hands with one another–one body of Christ, as we sing...Jesus loves me, this I know... 

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