Rivers and Vines

John 15: 1-17

Dr. Eileen Sypher
  Installation for Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer

Rockville United Church

November 4, 2007

It is so very good to be here. It is so very good that we are here, that we who are friends in and of this church and of Duncan, that we who are friends in Christ, have come together on this day! This is the day, the long awaited day, the day that the Lord hath made, let us rejoice and be glad in it!

I am so honored to be here on this day for my dear friend Duncan, so honored and filled with awe to stand here with you as we all together, you this congregation and representatives of the United Church of Christ and the Presbyterian Church, install Duncan Newcomer as your pastor, Word bringer, wise teacher, listener, spirit guide, the one who feeds you bread and cup, blesses you with the waters of baptism—and brings you love and laughter. Last year a book came out called, “God Laughs and Plays.” Duncan has known this about God for a very long time!

We this day install Duncan. We don’t usually use the word “install” for people. But the installation of a pastor within a congregation is an ancient practice, a public, joy-filled,
ceremonious liturgy. And liturgy, from the Greek, means “work of the people.” Today we work together to settle this pastor within this congregation that has called him.

But the work of today is not really ours. It is God’s work. God is working God’s purposes out in the sacred encounter between a congregation who calls and the pastor who answers. So today we thank God for God’s work.

We in our UCC & Presbyterian reformed tradition borrow today, in this liturgy of installation, from ancient high church ceremonies in which clergy were seated in special, ornate, high chairs, to signify their new place of presiding in the cathedral. We’re more plain than that! We don’t have any special ornate chair for you, Duncan. (And I think we in the reformed tradition prefer anyway to think of our clergy as standing up before us and God, as in our Psalm reading today!)

We’re more plain, but we’re also more inward. Jeremiah, whom some say was Jesus’ favorite prophet, says write: God’s covenant inside, on your hearts; and that’s what we do this day. We today, together, write the covenant between this congregation and Duncan on all our hearts. My part today, as a spirit friend to you, is to help us seat this covenant in our minds, yes, but even more in our hearts.

The purposes of God. Everything on the earth, and the seas, and the rivers is the Lord’s, says our Psalm. I do believe it, even a small river on the coast of Maine is not hidden from God’s sight and God’s plan, perhaps especially when it comes to the joining of a pastor and a people. I remember the first time I ever heard Duncan say “a church in Rockville, Md.” The four of us, he, Nancy, my husband John and I were sitting one August day on a sun porch looking out over the Sheepscot River. I remember at that moment, when he said “Rockville,” the timbre of Duncan’s voice. It was as if a pebble had dropped deep into a well. A silence framed his words, the still small voice of God. I knew then that were you to call him, he and Nancy would leave Connecticut to come to you. I saw that river moving toward Maryland that August day, as insistent as the outgoing tide.

Rockville did not go away in Duncan, nor did Duncan go away in you either in all those months before he came here. God’s rivers continued to lead to you, to your union. After that August moment, came November, a year ago tomorrow, and I was again facing Rockville. I was sitting up in the raised pulpit area of a white-clapboard, high-steepled New England church in an old town on the Connecticut River. I was there looking out at the congregation, trying to be discreet (which is hard when you’re up front!). I was looking for the then strangers I knew would be sitting there hearing Duncan preach, people later I would come to know as Frank and Scott. I saw them. And I saw all of Duncan’s friends in that church where he’d been a member for years and at one time their beloved pastoral counselor. I saw the way they shook his hand and hugged him, as if they sensed that the twenty year silken ties between them could be stretching as far away as Rockville.

A tale of two rivers, one in Maine, one in Connecticut. Five months later Duncan would get into his car to ride the far less beautiful macadam river of the New Jersey turnpike to come here to be your pastor.

God working God’s purposes out. It feels to me, this coming together of a pastor and a people, like an irresistible river of grace, beyond all our understanding, a river so strong it can pull a family from a beloved place and land and silken ties to a brand new place, and pull a people to welcome a new pastor, so much so that strangers will come to call each other, as you do, friends, friends in Christ. It is to be reckoned sacred, such a coming together. You did not choose me, says Jesus. I chose you. God working God’s purposes out.

After the rivers brought you at last together, I took to walking my own Connecticut roads. I was following Augustine’s advice: solvatur ambulando: solve it by walking. What I was trying to solve was this sermon for you, about you and Duncan together now, about what your growing covenant together now is.

The roads I walk on are winding and wooded, roads with names like “Butter Jones,” after a dairy farmer who probably once lived there, roads flanked by woods and fields and small houses with often big gardens, gardens with vines. There are not many grape vines, but there are raspberry vines and other fruiting branches, of apples and peaches, and tomatoes. All these fruits were swelling in the warm fall days.

My understanding of your deep, inward covenant with each other, pastor and people, grew with those fruits. It grew as I began to practice a new way of seeing those fruits by the side of the road, a way of seeing that Duncan has opened in me over the years, opened as I sat listening to many of his sermons.

This is one of Duncan’s greatest gifts to us: that he helps us see differently, helps us see the world, whether it be a back road in Connecticut or the Rockville Pike, helps us see with a holy imagination. A holy imagination. It’s a little like putting on new glasses, or perhaps a more apt image, getting permanent implants. These lenses are not rose-colored, but rather lenses that magnify God here and now, wherever we are. Through these lenses we see that there is no place, no place in our daily life, on a Connecticut back road or on the Rockville Pike, where God is not.

The gardens and fields and vines became no longer just my neighbor’s, a pleasant scene, a photograph. Instead they began to seem as traces, as shadows, shadows of God’s own being, God’s colors, God’s sap, God’s sweetness. There is no place where God is not.

I was thinking of you all the while I was looking, thinking of this day, of this church. There is no place where all God’s people are not. On that small road 300 miles away, or here right now, you and I, all of us and God share a single trunk, a single vine.

Jesus says: “I am the true vine, and you are the fruits. I have called you friends. Abide in me.”

Each tree, each plant, each branch, a part of Jesus, the one vine. Jesus says, you are my branches, each church a branch of me, not disconnected Connecticut branches or Rockville branches, not branches really separate from each other. Jesus says, you are all my fruits, fruits I fill with my word, my one word. We draw one juice, one life, from a single source way down deep, from the one true vine, the one true word. We draw our life from Jesus Christ.

Fall is coming to an end in Connecticut, slowly this year. The bees, as Keats puts it, have come to think that “warm days will never cease”--we’ve not yet had a killing frost. But I know when I walk in another month, the fruited branches I now see will be those “bare ruined choirs” Shakespeare speaks of. Some fruits, unpicked, will be rotting on the ground. And next year the cycle will all begin again.

But for us, here, everywhere, in the church, branches of Jesus’ one true vine, there is no withering. Our individual fruits, when they fall, will not die. Our branches, our churches, will always be fruiting. You, this congregation pastored by Duncan, will remain here abiding in love, growing the sweet fruit, even when winter comes. You will be in Rockville, and others of us will be far away, but we will all be singing songs and fed by the word of God. Those of us with you this day of Duncan’s installation here, in this church, sharing in this celebration of God’s purposes revealed, will carry within us your lovely, abundant fruiting written deep in our hearts. Amen