Proper 15 B — 2006, Proverbs 9:1-6, Psalm 34:9-14, Ephesians 5:15-20, John 6:53-59 The Rev. J. Brian Ponder Church of the Resurrection Starkville, Mississippi August 20, 2006 In the Name of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen. Over the summer break, I was surprised one day to find among the notes in my email’s inbox a message from a former classmate of mine from junior high school, who’d written after “Google-ing” my name online. … Jackie had to have done a little bit of searching, because I’ve “Googled” myself before, and there are a number of Brian Ponders floating out there, the others ranging from everything like a high school soccer player to an insurance rep. Jackie was emailing to let me know that she’d been thinking lately about some of the folks from a particular class we’d taken back then in which we’d worked on special projects in small groups, and she wanted to see where folks had ended up … To be honest with you, I think she was a little surprised to find out that I’m now a priest. … My strange sense of humor from those days (which, as many of you know, I have not lost) probably had something to do with her surprise, but Jackie told me in one of the messages how pleased she was that I was making a difference through my life’s journey—her words not mine, mind you. … After emailing back-and-forth, sharing bits and pieces of the information we had on our mutual friends from years ago, I got the idea this past week to take a look through several of my yearbooks from what’s now beginning to feel like “way back then.” There’s so much that’s changed since those school days—elementary and junior high, high school and even college. Many of those friends and faces have come and gone, others I hear about from time-to-time through random encounters, or when folks like Jackie drop me a line; others simply dropped off the face of the earth, and yet others of us have remained very close. Until Jackie wrote and until I opened up those yearbooks this week, it had been a long time since I’d even given a second thought to many of those former friends and classmates … remembering how close we once were, thinking that we’d be friends forever, that things wouldn’t change—that they’d just be different as we moved in numerous directions, reading (I can’t tell you how many times in the back pages of several of the books things like … “Don’t change.” and “Stay sweet.” or any number of other little clichés mingled in with both longer and shorter remembrances. And what I realized as I worked my way through the books was that those little remembrances, the sayings, the signatures, the notes—they got fewer and fewer as the years went by. In fact, the yearbook from my senior year was actually mailed to us over the summer following our graduation from high school, so nothing, nothing about “Staying sweet,” no chance of mistakenly scribbling “See you next year,.” nothing of “not changing” was to be found amongst those pages. And I thought to myself as I turned each page, though I am a little saddened now to not have gotten those final signatures of my classmates and friends … I thought “how appropriate.” How appropriate not to have fooled ourselves, wishing that things wouldn’t change at that point, or that they wouldn’t or shouldn’t be different, or that we should simply hold on to the memories of those yesterdays just because ant not move forward. How appropriate, looking back, it is that the new chapter had already begun, that the chapters to come were already in the works—whether we realized it or not back then … the absence of those little notes, however genuine any of us felt them to be back then, to stay put, to hold on to what was known, to not be moved. AND how appropriate for us to consider today … here at the outset of a new day, and a new time, and a new chapter for ourselves and the life of this community in which we find ourselves. How appropriate for us to consider that inevitable change that is part of life and the progression of time and our journey. … How appropriate. There are a number of things from our lessons today that move me as we transition into the new academic year, things that might be appropriate specifically because we are in a university town, though they are things—for lack of a better word—that have a universal relevance as well. Our lessons strike me as “the talk”—that life-lesson talk that I suppose most, if not all, of us had as we left for school—whether it was grade school or college—that talk where we’re reminded of who we are and that there will be many choices ahead of us, that we can make good decisions or bad ones, that, no matter what, each has a consequence, and that those who are rooting for us really do have our best interests at heart, though the decisions would be ours for the making. … Sound a little familiar? … Perhaps “the talk” didn’t actually come as we headed back or off to school. Maybe it came after the first couple of days of school, or maybe it was after that first semester, or maybe it was somewhere else down the line … over the phone in the middle of the night maybe, or even somewhere else. … I’d be willing to bet that most of us know about “that talk.” Our lessons today, if nothing else, are about seizing the day … Carpe Diem! … “that talk,” the good advice that has unfortunately become just another overused saying, even becoming a bit cliché. Seize the day! Make a difference! Choose wisely! Follow your bliss! Aim higher! … But the meat of the saying, what’s at its very core—and the heart of all of these sayings as a matter of fact—involves persistence and change. They’re about transformation! They’re about having missed the mark, and having realized it, or having had it pointed out, doing something about it! ... It’s stuff we already know but of which we must again and again be reminded. … “Stay sweet,” “Don’t change,” … that’s just saccharin. … “Make a change,” “Act now,” “Move on it!” … These call us to transformation. Our lessons remind us of and call us to new beginnings, new starts, where each new day is just that … a new day for us to enter into new ways of being. So our lessons are about: 1) choice; and 2) invitation; and 3) transformation. I love this time of year, as many of you will remember from this month’s parish newsletter. I love it, because each new academic year, every time those cicadas start singing, each time the cycle turns and comes round, we’re offered the opportunity and chance to begin anew. It’s, in many respects, like wiping the slate clean. It is like starting over and finding a newer voice and a newer path and a newer vision … at least it is for me. ... And, Jesus, no less, invites us into this same kind of renewed experience—this new way of being again and again … IF … if we choose wisely, if we aim higher, if we follow a truer, a “real-er” bliss … … if we open ourselves up to true change and transformation. Those of us who have been following the gospel lessons over the past few weeks are probably tired of the message, because a lot of it has seemingly been repeating itself ad nauseam. But I think what’s at its very core, beyond its flesh and blood imagery, the back and forth talk of literal food compared against heavenly sustenance, … what it boils down to is the message that Jesus sustains us. … Our abiding in the resurrected One is all we ever need or needed; and if we really trust in that—if we put faith in it and what this really means with all of its implications and ramifications—it frees us to make new beginnings, to be able to look towards new days and for new ways of being—whether we’re headed out for the first time on our own, or just across the hall to another grade, or much further down the road in the midst of the humdrum on this journey we call life. … Jesus calls us to himself for refreshment and renewal, and all we have to do is respond. … … … May we ever look for new ways of being. May we realize more fully the transformation into which we’re being invited. Amen.