Sunday, August 13 - Ghosts

 This sermon was preached for Sunday, August 13 at St. Mark's, East Longmeadow. The texts for this sermon were: Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28, Psalm 105:1-6, 16-22, 45b, and Matthew 14:22-33.

Googling around in the last couple of years during a brief health scare with one of my kids - I don’t remember which or when - I stumbled across a beautiful article from April 2019, by a mother, Julie Kim, about her daughter, Izzy. Izzy was born unusually small and with a heart defect, so she had needed open heart surgery at just a few months old. Kim did her own seeking out for reassurance and support and ended up talking on the phone with a couple whose child had been through the same surgery and was now a rambunctious five year old. She reached out to a woman who had been through the surgery as an infant decades before – that person emailed her about her high school years as a feisty, sporty teenager. When Izzy’s surgery went well, Kim felt confident that her daughter’s future would, perhaps, look just like that boy and that woman’s had. 

Then at eight months old, Izzy’s doctors discovered the underlying cause for Izzy’s condition and other troubling clues they’d noticed - Izzy had a rare genetic deletion syndrome. The syndrome, her mother learned, meant there would be a high likelihood of severe milestone delays, more organ defects, and seizures. Her child might not ever walk or talk. Kim wrote, “Just as we’d caught sight of land, we were again suddenly unmoored, pushed by unforgiving hands back out into the dark, open sea.”

Cast out on that stormy sea, Kim began the painful process of grieving the life she had imagined for her child. She knew that in order to love her daughter, in order to celebrate Izzy for who she was and who she could be, Kim would need to let go of the images of future Izzy that she had clung to. In order to see her daughter clearly, Kim had to banish the ghosts of that rambunctious 5 year old and the sporty teen and all the other people she thought Izzy would grow up to be. 

“I am learning that grief can be complicated and ambiguous,” she writes, “...that we hold ideas and expectations of ourselves and loved ones so tightly that we have difficulty seeing them from any distance, and that it’s even harder to let them go.” 

When the disciples look out from their boat into the stormy sea, they see a mysterious figure coming toward them over the waves. They’re pretty sure what they're seeing is a ghost and they are terrified. But it’s not a ghost - it’s a living, breathing Jesus, walking toward his friends. He says to them, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”

It’s important to remember that this story happens right after the feeding of the five thousand. Jesus hasn’t been killed yet, he’s at the height of his ministry. Later on, after the crucifixion and resurrection, Jesus will once again run around proving he’s not a ghost. But here in this story, the Gospel writer is underscoring how difficult it was for the disciples to wrap their heads around Jesus’ identity even while he performs miracles right in front of them. It was easier for them to reach for a concept borrowed from the surrounding religions and cultures of their time, the idea of a phantom - the apparition of a dead person who was improperly buried. It was easier for them to see a ghost than to accept Jesus' true nature. Only later, when everyone’s back in the boat, are they able to marvel, “Truly you are the son of God.”

If ghosts are what linger when we are unable to fully let go, if ghosts are what haunt us when we have not properly laid a person, a hope, a dream to rest, then we are right to fear them. That kind of ghost can keep us from loving the living, the ones right here with us, even when who those people actually are challenges us in painful or transformative ways. Ghosts can keep us from seeing the miracle.

When does the ghost of what once was or the ghost of what could have been prevent us from seeing the person standing in front of us? When does it prevent us from seeing Christ’s living, breathing presence among us? 

At one of my first Diocesan conventions in the Diocese of Massachusetts, a young woman in her thirties stood up and shared about what it was like to attend a small church as one of the only youngish adults who regularly attended her parish. It was difficult for her to find her place as an unmarried woman with no kids in a community of retired and elderly folks. Then, she described how painful it was to hear the other parishioners bemoan, “Where are the young people?” She would think, “Hello, I’m right here! I’m sitting right here in your pews!” But she realized that her fellow congregants were too busy seeing the ghosts of the large bustling church schools packed with the young families and children that once were that they could not see her and what she had to offer. Haunted by the ghosts of what were and what could have been, they missed seeing Christ alive and well in their midst. Yet he was there. He is here, too.

God is doing new things here, incredible things, in small ways and big ways. Just in this past year or so, a new outreach ministry has sparked creativity and engagement with two of the most poignant issues of our day: the dignity of LGBTQ folks and the protection of asylees. A dozen or so toddlers and babies have regularly blessed us with their giggles and wiggles and baptisms. Several new recovery groups have sprung up in our Great Hall, including a brave space for women striving for sobriety. This summer, young adults in their 20s and 30s have been gathering at bars and grandparents and great-grandparents after coffee hour to talk about God and life and faith. In all different ministries, new leaders have stepped up, new members have joined. Don’t let the ghosts fool you, Jesus is walking on water here at St. Mark’s. The miracle, for me, is all of you.

I do not fear the dead. In the Episcopal tradition, we believe that those who have gone to God before us gather here at our table at every Eucharist. The faithful dead are a great cloud of witnesses, present with us in some mysterious way. Joining their voices with us as we sing, Holy, Holy, Holy Lord. Unlike ghosts, the community of saints help us to see Christ’s presence - they point us to God alive with us and in us. 

No, what I fear are ghosts. What I fear are illusions that draw us toward ideas and hopes that are dead and gone, but linger anyway because they were improperly buried or not fully grieved. 

I have great respect for Julie Kim, the mother of the infant with the genetic deletion syndrome. Her honesty, her striving to love her daughter authentically for who she is struck a chord with me, and I think any reader who fears never being able to live up to hopes and expectations that are no longer viable.

I wonder if you, too, have known the pain of someone looking at you but not seeing you, not really, only seeing the ghost of who you were or who they hoped you were. Once, a long time ago, after the end of my first serious romantic relationship, I met up again with the person I had been in love with. And I remember even at the time being painfully aware that we were too haunted by the echoes of what once had been to appreciate who each other was now. The ghost of our dead relationship stood in the way. It still took me a while to learn - too long in fact – that as long as that love remained improperly grieved, a living, real friendship between the two people we were now could never grow.

Kim finishes her piece with a defense of realism over false hope. “Without crumbly, unreliable hope, what else is there? There’s my child, no less alive or human than any other, and with abilities and inabilities much different than I imagined. And realism, which I’ll use to reassemble a positive, long-term picture of what her life could be. Izzy’s diagnosis wiped my canvas clean. But while the expanse of whiteness is unsettling, it is also temporary. Soon there will be lines, contours, shading—a new and beautiful composition. I will not accept less.”

We do not have to accept the echoes of the past nor the illusion of life. We get to have faith in what is really, truly alive and walking toward us in the storm.