Made at Saint David's

​As many of you know, but still shocking for me to say out loud, I turn sixty today. Also amazing for me to think about, Thursday will be the 14th anniversary of my arrival here at Saint David’s. Time flies when you are having fun!
 
I had hoped for upbeat readings this morning. That’s not exactly what we have. But as I sat with our readings, I came to appreciate them as more encouraging, and more relevant, than I first thought.
 
I begin with our Psalm. It is called a Psalm “of David,” but we can think of these as our words, too.
 
“I will thank you [God] because I am marvelously made; your works are wonderful, and I know it very well….Your eyes beheld my limbs, yet unfinished in the womb; all of them were written in your book; they were fashioned day by day” (139:13, 15).
 
We are the wonderful works of God in the Psalm. We are marvelously made. Beginning even before we were born, God had a plan for us. Even now, God fashions us day by day.
 
That’s a good start.
 
Then Jeremiah gives us a picture of God fashioning us. God is the potter working away at the divine potter’s wheel, and we are the clay God is working on, fashioning our limbs, shaping our characters, molding us into the kind of people God invites us to be and to become.
 
That image can make it sound like we don’t have any role in how we turn out. After all, as Jeremiah says, clay can’t protest to the potter that it doesn’t like what the potter is doing with it.
 
But as Jeremiah keeps going, he makes it clear that our choices matter, too. If we are on an evil path, but repent, God says, “I will change my mind about the disaster that I intended to bring on [you]” (18:8). What we do, how we respond to God, determines in part what our final shape will be.
 
So, God is fashioning us, and God is working with us in the process of fashioning us, into the marvelous works that we are becoming, with God’s help.
 
Our Gospel reading describes that same process in a slightly different way. As we draw closer to God, we go through a process of stripping away anything that might hold us back. That stripping can include the people we love, our possessions, our desire for life itself. We have to let go of whatever prevents us from becoming the people God invites us to become.
 
The great sculptor Michaelangelo described what I think Jeremiah and Luke are getting at. When he was sculpting an angel from a block of marble, Michaelangelo said, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set [the angel] free.”
 
The angel was already there, in the uncarved block of marble. But the angel was concealed, covered, trapped, until Michaelangelo carved away the excess layers on top to reveal, that is, to set free, the angel within.
 
That is how God works on us. We start as a block of unformed clay or marble. And God, the great potter in the sky, gets to work on us, giving us form. And part of that process of divine formation is stripping away the layers on top of the marvelous work concealed in the clay, stripping away the stuff that prevents us from being the people God invites us to become, freeing us from even the apparently good things that actually imprison us.
 
That’s a beautiful way to describe the Christian journey from spiritual birth at our baptisms all the way through the process of sanctification, when God makes us holy enough to stand in God’s own presence as God’s creation and as God’s beloved children.
 
I love that way of describing Christian formation any day, but it is particularly relevant to me today. Turning sixty feels like a milestone. That and the anniversary of my first Sunday here at Saint David’s makes me ponder the place of Saint David’s in the spiritual formation of me and my family.
 
I think first about our children. Our sons were entering 7th and 9th grade when we arrived. They are now 26 and 28, and adulting, more or less. In important ways, this is where they grew up. This is the first Church they remember with any clarity as their Church. This is where they began to make choices for themselves about their faith.
 
As for me, I was in my forties when I arrived here, firmly mid-life. Now I’m entering my senior years. That change is visible in all sorts of ways, starting up top. I arrived with a relatively full head of hair. You see what has happened. This is the place where it happened.
 
This has also been my Church home for longer than any other single place. Other Churches have been important to me, but none for as long a time or as deep an involvement as Saint David’s.
 
God has used this place, God has used you, to form me, to shape me, to carve away things that keep me from being who I am called to be.
 
I am grateful to this parish for many things, but I think particularly about two.
 
First, Saint David’s provided roots for my family and me when we moved to Massachusetts.
 
I was anxious about leaving family, friends, and career in Georgia to embark on a new life as—think about what this means for a southerner—as a Yankee. That was not easy!
 
When we arrived in Massachusetts, I needed community. And almost immediately you became my primary community. You are the people who supported me in that important transition in my life journey.
 
This is also the place where I first truly lived into my priesthood.
 
I was fortunate in my mentors along the way. But I remember thinking about one of them in particular that he was a priest straight through. He wasn’t just filling a role or doing a job. He truly lived as priest. I don’t mean that he was always saintly. He was a good man, but of course he botched it sometimes. But even when he botched it, he was still a priest.
 
I wanted to be like that. I wanted to be a priest straight through. But I definitely wasn’t when I arrived here. At that time, I didn’t think of myself as a priest so much as a teacher who had gotten ordained and could do priest things. When I met people, that was often how I introduced myself: as a teacher who was also happened to be a priest.
 
Gradually that changed. There was no single magic moment when it happened. But over my time here, I got comfortable being a priest. I even got used to introducing myself to strangers as a priest, although I can tell you, that is a conversation-stopper at parties.
 
Living into my priesthood has probably been the single most important development in my spiritual life during the time we have lived in Massachusetts, as I was finishing mid-life and preparing to become an elder. And that happened here, largely thanks to you.
 
As I enter this new stage of life, as I begin my next decade and my fifteenth year here at Saint David’s, I thank God for this parish, and for you, its people, for the many ways God has used you to form me. And I pray that we can all continue our journeys, continue being shaped by God, through the rest of our centennial year and beyond. In Christ’s name. Amen.