Meeting Old Friends Again,

For the First Time

 

    As many of you know, our daughter Carmen has never been a proverbial shrinking violet.  She has an outsized personality, meets people easily, and has aroster of “close friends” that rivals St. Mary’s membership.  So when she said she had made two new friends, we weren’t surprised. What did surprise us is when she told they are about 70. “That’s a new twist,” we thought, and we took this as a sign of maturity.

    When she told us as well that she thought they and we would have a lot in common, my response was, “Well, obviously, not in terms of age!”  After a Carmenesque eye-roll in response to my comment, she went on to explain that he was a physician and she a former college administrator with one of those fancy degrees that start with “P.”  As a result, we agreed to meet them at a dinner party.

    After the initial meeting, we found that we enjoyed their company immediately.  She was elegant, yet direct and insightful. He was humorous and delightfully self-effacing.  It turned out they were Episcopalian and had been members of St. Mark’s Cathedral and St. Clement’s.  They learned I am a priest, yet that did not seem to inhibit their frank expression and tastefully off-color references.  As the evening progressed, we made our way through the marvelous tragedy that is the contemporary church.  Since they had an adopted Japanese daughter, I told them about my year in Japan, and we talked about the unfolding drama of Asia, past and present. The physician told of recommending people to chiropractors years ago, a somewhat uncommon practice, because they have greater social sanction to touch and he believed in the healing power of touch. The wine was vintage, the wild rice exceptional, the portabello mushrooms and chicken memorable. The evening evaporated as six people laughed at human foibles, told classic stories, and assessed the prospects for the years ahead.  It was as though we had known each other for years.

    Meeting old friends for the first time is, to say the least, unusual. This is no longer the age of spontaneity and immediate trust.  As our electronic devices to communicate multiply, the human touch seems more remote and less frequently given. In fact, the number of such devices we have may well be a fairly good measure of our emerging loneliness.

    Church ought to be a place where people we have just met seem like old friends before the hour is out.  To come together into a church is to say that we concede that something is missing in our lives, that some repair and amendment of the way we lead our lives is needed.  The opening hymn and procession call us together in that common quest.  The lessons tell of our common humanity; no matter our financial situation, job, or educational background, to be human means that we are made in the image of God and are incomplete without the presence of the Creator.

    To make common confession of sin together means we accept that no one is finally better than another, that no seat is a better seat, that God welcomes all as “children of the heavenly Father.”  To hear the singular story of Easter, which we relive in each Eucharist, is to be reassured that God stays with us, through thick and thin.  Jesus has been through it all, we hear, and therefore God understands everything that you and I would be reluctant to tell even an old friend.  With all the gritty detail, God loves us still.

    This Sunday, when a community gathers at St. Mary’s, for the Eucharist and for brunch, if you meet some people for the first time or spend some time with some you don’t know well, it ought to be like meeting old friends for the first time.

Fr. Larry Crockett