As we all may well know by now, change is difficult. Even sometimes change we seek, strive for, commit to, can be difficult. It can be tough for a whole community to make a change or shift; it can be tough for a family, or a couple, or an individual to make a change. And, of course, plenty of change comes upon us unsought, unwelcome, when we are unready.

 

Life As Quicksand:  The More Things Change

 

This morning I’m revisiting a story I told you many years ago because it feels like a good time to tell it again; over 30 years ago, when I was a young student minister, I would always meet with my supervisor, Woody, in his office, which was also the church’s administrative space.  He had a desk and a chair, I had a chair, and we were surrounded by the copier, and tables with lots on them: reams of paper, paper cutters, hole punchers, file folders, calendars, computers and so forth.  There were a bunch of storage boxes for old records and files under the tables.  They had big, preprinted labels on them with four sections to be filled in.  One section was labeled “FROM:” for the origins or initial date of the material inside the box.  Then “TO:” for the destination or the end date of the material inside. Then “CONTENTS:” obviously to describe what was within.  And “DESTROY:” with space for the date by which the content would no longer be required or relevant.

 

I used to look at those boxes – mostly the labels were blank – and think, how organized and tidy and appealing they looked.  How nice it would be if life was like this, if everything in life could effectively be dealt with by those boxes.  If we always knew precisely when an issue arose, and if we knew precisely the date when it ended, if we could easily say exactly what everything was, and if – this would be so freeing – we definitely knew when we would no longer need it, or when we would be done with it – and have that freeing scheduled, even written down, so ready to go.

 

Because it was so obvious that life was nothing like that.  Things rose slowly into awareness and everything was complicated and hard so sum up or categorize –nowadays we call it intersectionality but back then I just called it complicated – and it was never clear if or when we were ever really done with anything.  To me, those storage boxes were an illusion – no wonder their labels were mostly empty! – and life was messy and hard to manage and so full of flux and evolution and surprises good and bad, not just for me, but for the church I was learning to serve and all the people going through all the ups and downs and heartbreak and beauty of living.

 

Even then it was apparent to me that one of the ongoing challenges of being a human being, and being a human being living with other human beings, was dealing with change.  Change in us, in our bodies, in our minds, in what we know and what we know we don’t know, in what we think and how we work, change in our circumstances and context, change in our society, change in our families and friends – I can go all day just listing all the kinds of change we all constantly encounter all the time.  But I think you get my point.

 

Which brings us, of all things, to quicksand.  It brings us to quicksand because quicksand is sometimes what living in these turbulent and reactive times can feel like, and it is also pretty much the perfect opposite of those tidy storage boxes.  We’re going through our days, often fairly challenged already, and then we find suddenly that everything is different – we lose a loved one, we receive a diagnosis, we lose a job, Ancestry.com tells us we have an unknown relative, our eyes are opened to an injustice we hadn’t already registered, we lose or gain something that rocks our world, we are subject to fire or flood or tornado or earthquake, literally or figuratively, and we find that what we thought was firm ground is actually quicksand.

 

The recommended response to quicksand is so surprising because it’s not what you’d expect.  It doesn’t work to try to lift yourself out of it, or wade through it.  Rather, the only way to safely extract yourself, once you’re in it, is to cast yourself into it and swim.  Of course quicksand is not like water and the action of swimming through it isn’t easy and it doesn’t flow – it’s hard and slow and tiring – and it’s the only way out.  That’s right – the only way out is through.

 

 

It’s funny, in a way, that we even have to process this because of course everything changes, and life has its highs and lows, as does history, we know that.  Technically none of us is the some from one moment to the next, cells are growing and dying all the time, every 7 years our cells have all changed, we all grow and we all age, some of the toughest change of all.  And yet – we do have to process this, in part because when things are good or peaceful or at least better than they were, of course we want to hang on to it.  Just dwell in that sweetness and not have to engage with everything else, or anything else, or with the inevitable turning of hours or days that inevitably brings the end of some things, even situations – or people – we would give everything to keep, the beginning of other circumstances – and other people – and the inevitable next chapters, whether dreaded or hoped for, in our lives.

 

So we have to process because our heart’s desire to stop time will never prevail.  And we have to process this also because of the difference between change we choose and change that comes upon us.  Nobody’s prepared for change that descends like an ambush.  And nobody is surprised that we resist and mourn sudden devastation.  We’ve all been there.

 

And yet, even change we seek and work for can still be really hard.  A job long sought.  A degree long pursued.  A child long tried for.  When Tim and I got married – after 6 years of being together (– I know, 6 years!  So long!  Anyway –) when we got married after 6 years of being together, and with both of us being in our 40’s at that point – well, to say the least, it was welcome change.  We had worked hard to get there.  And still, for me, it was difficult.  Finally it was time to change from being a single person, who needed to remember to look out for herself, to a married person who needed to look out for my spouse as much as myself, or no, not even that – time to change to a person who needed to look out for us – not me, not me and him, but more than that, this new, wedded creation that was ‘us’ – I had literally even a new name. In fact I chose to take Tim’s name precisely because I could feel that getting married later in life, it was hard to change gears, hard to go from being me to being us.  And I was worried – rightly I believe – that my holding back in any way would undermine our marriage.  So I was marrying a wonderful guy, we had a wonderful life together, I had no reservations or misgivings about it – and still it was hard, on deep levels, to absorb this new reality as mine, to absorb this new identity as mine, and even to honor it sometimes as I knew I should.  I never thought, beforehand, that getting married would be hard to take in and live up to, but in the beginning it sometimes felt that way.  It took time and some deliberate work, to settle in, and frankly, it still takes work  to be ‘us’ instead of ‘me,’ and I am grateful every day that I have this work to do and this man to do it with – and it’s still work.

 

Back in the 1970’s there was a bestselling nonfiction book called Future Shock by Alvin Toffler.  He defined future shock as ‘too much change in too short a time’ which results in an experience he describes as ‘the premature arrival of the future.’  It was an important insight when the book came out, and I think it’s still important.  This is the essence of the challenge of change, even sometimes of good change, even sometimes of change we want or sought.  Change is change, and people are creatures of habit, and getting acclimated to change takes effort and ‘too much’ change can feel be hard to accept.

 

I think that’s what’s going on in our country right now is people struggling to come to terms with all the change, paying attention to suffering and injustices too many of us ignored, or were simply ignorant of, for way too long.  There’s so much to take in, so much to make up for, so much to change.  And even though there are so many joys and gifts on the other side of the work, the work is hard and sometimes it feels bad and leaves people unable to take in all the change, people rejecting change that overwhelms them.

 

But while that’s playing out nationally on a macro level, my concern this morning is the more immediate. I don’t know how each of us does with change, we are learning together how our congregation does with change in our time as a church.  Our strategic plan – which we created and chose together – has brought new intentionality and focus to our existence as a beloved community which has already carried change with it, and will continue to, going forward.  And I know there will be times for each of us in our lives, and for all of us together in this beloved community, when we are – or will be – challenged by change.  With this homily, there is something I would offer, and something I would ask, regarding this challenge.

 

What I offer is this:  as with quicksand, when we are struggling with change, the only way out, is through.  Change we choose or not will keep coming upon us, and when it does, we have to cast ourselves into it and swim to get to where we can gain a handhold and find our way onto firmer ground again. Sometimes that ‘firmer ground’ won’t even what we used to understand could be firmer ground –but change changes us along with things around us – and sometimes we define firm ground in whole new ways because of what we experience and learn along our journey.  It’s not just change, it’s also sometimes evolution – and when it is evolution, we are always the better for it.

 

Herakleitos of Ephesos was a self-taught philosopher who lived about a hundred years or so before Socrates, in the Greco-Persian city of Ephesos in what is now Turkey.  He is the one who famously said “no one ever steps in the same river twice.”  Which is tied to his other most famous pronouncement “Panta rei, or in English: ‘Everything flows.’  His point was that even a great river is not actually ever the same river – it is part of the nature of all things that water moves with a current, that new water flows to fill a river bed, that it shrinks in a drought, it swells in a flood, its inhabitants come and go, live and die, as do all who ride the river on their own journeys.

 

So yes, life can be quicksand.  But it is not only quicksand, which is why it is possible to swim our way through even the most quicksand times in our life and find our way to some shore, some firmer ground that awaits us, even if it is a different ground entirely than we ever trod before.  Because everything flows.  We need to cultivate that awareness.  We need to hold onto that.  And we also need to be aware that we are living in a time of intense tumult that doesn’t even take into account the tumult in our personal lives.  In addition to which, our church is on a journey too, so that’s a lot.  Even just with these Sundays – today we bid Mandy goodbye with gratitude and affection and lots of hope for our future and hers.  Next week we welcome our incoming DRE Jenny Nelson.  This after many years of intense challenge and change as we thanked Cathy Seggel for her decades of service, as we worked to come through COVID, as we changed intensely to meet all we encountered.  There’s a lot right there for us – joy and sorrow are woven fine.  But here’s the thing.  In beloved community – even in the hardest times – we are not alone.  We have each other – to be sad with, to be mad with, to struggle with, to lean on, to share with, to learn from – as well as to rejoice with, journey with, love with.  And that helps.  We are here together, we are here for each other, we are here for our lives joys and changes and challenges, and we are here for our church’s joys and changes and challenges, and those of the larger world around us.  Together we meet it all.   This is happening all the time. People are coming to church, this church, right now, for comfort, for strength, for wisdom, for vision, for balance, for justice, for hope, for life.

 

Therefore, I want to ask you now (go downstairs):

Please take somebody’s hand.  Take the hand of your friend or your love in the pew with you. Take the hand of the good neighbor or the good stranger in the pew in front of or behind you.  Let us all take each others’ hands for a moment.  Because this is what we have.  When we’re sinking in the quicksand, when we’re swimming in the quicksand, when we’re seeking a handhold or finding the shore, when we are standing on a new shore, when we are sussing out our evolving self, immersed in change we wanted, or change we dreaded, or change we never anticipated, with all its gifts and challenges, this is still what we have.  Each other.  We have the people we love, the people we will love but may not know yet, the people who will hold us and be held by us, who will teach us and learn from us, as we live and struggle and learn and change, even when our path takes a turn, or our footing gives underneath us.  It’s not easy to swim holding hands, I’ll admit it, and it would probably make swimming in quicksand harder.  But it is so much easier to live holding hands, and that is what we are actually doing, right now in this moment and every day as we move through out lives with each other at our sides.  And this is, and will be, enough to matter and to make a difference, for us in this church and sometimes even well beyond us.  Changed and changing.  Together.   Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction

 

Sermon