Living Together

Reflection for the First Sunday of Christmas                         Thomas E Wilson, Guest Celebrant Grace Church, Plymouth, St Marks/St. Anne, Roper December 28, 2024 Living Together Isaiah 61:10-62:3  Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7      John 1:1-18 Psalm 147:13-21 Today, the 5th Sunday of the month, it is your habit to gather the two churches together and we have a meal together as an outward and visible sign to yourselves and others that there is a deeper connection than just being Episcopal churches in the same part of the state. While most of the services these churches do are held in the respective churches, you get along well, in spite of the fact there is often a spirit of competition in Episcopal churches. Every place I have lived in my life there are Episcopal churches in driving distance from each other. We Episcopalians get used to going to one church , and when we feel just like trying out something different we might visit another venue, but our heart  stays in the church of our family.  However, you on the 5th Sunday of the month acknowledge that there is a deeper connection rather than  a competition.  You have agreed to live together, to see yourselves, and that is important as a sign of a “deeper reality”;  what, to use a phrase from a Christmas sermon by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King called “an inescapable network of mutuality”. Dr. King said in that Sermon:  “It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality.”  In the Hebrew Testament lesson for today the Prophet Isiaiah is welcoming  the people who have been in exile back into a deeper relationship with God and God’s people. The purpose is not a return to the past but a new beginning of what King called that; “inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny.” I have been really hit with that concept of how we are all tied into a single garment. Before Christmas this year, I got a visit from Scott, one of my nephew’s and his family. Scott, his son and I all share the same middle name of my Grandfather Wilson’s first name, Everitt.They came up from Florida to visit me in Nags Head, and  then drove over to visit my sister in Wilmington, and their cousins in Chapel Hill, and  went sledding in the Mountains with his brother Mike and his family, then back to visit  my younger brother and his daughter in Florida, then his mother and sister in another part of Florida. Hundreds of miles driven with the desire to connect with family; that “inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny.” As I was writing this reflection on the day after Christmas, I was thinking about my daughter and I called her to tell her that I loved her. She is 55 years old with a great husband and two wonderful grown up sons aged 23 and 21; but she is still my baby that I held in my arms after we brought her home from the hospital where she was born, more than a half century ago.  I embarrass her when I remind her that she will always be my baby, but she admits she is swamped  with emotion when the oldest son who has moved out of the house to be on his own after he graduated for college last year, said that next year he wants to take some of his ornaments to put on his own tree.  Distance may give us an illusion that we are separated but  in that “inescapable network of mutuality.tied into a single garment of mutuality.” On the 22th of this month you hosted the Rev. Tommy Drake as your celebrant; he had been with you for years before he went to Nags Head. That is where I met him as I started to attend the church in which he was the Associate Rector. I grew fond of him. Then, this month he was called to be the 4th Rector of All Saints Parish, the church in Southern Shores, where I had served as Rector as the 2nd Rector for 15 years before I reached the mandatory retirement age of 72.  I was called back to that church last week to fill in as Preacher in the Christmas Eve services and the Celebrant and Preacher of the Christmas Day service. Three points in the conversation with parishioners was (1) how they were fond of me, Tom, as their old historic Rector,  and (2) how much they missed my wife who had died a year and a half ago, and (3) how much they were thrilled that Tommy was coming to be their new Rector. In my sermon in the  Christmas Eve services, I thanked the congregation on how they loved my wife and made her and I feel welcome to join them in the interrelated structure of reality of that church and urged them to love Tommy and his spouse as deeply as they loved us. If I had been bright enough to look ahead to this week I would have used the phrase; “the inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny.” An important part of the work of the church is outside the boundaries of the church buildings and engage in the work outside of church walls as Dr. King urged us to do work and “to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality.”  This work is with and for the people to whom we are not related or even fellow parishioners, but people, neighbors and strangers, who need to be loved and encouraged and prayed with and for. May your hearts be open to help to identify these people to be with you in this“inescapable network of mutuality.” Living Together Words spoken decades before, echo again, but now in different circumstances calling Justice to flow down over us when falling asleep, no longer noticing neighbor's pain. The new voices of those renewed prophets, echo those voices heard centuries before, warning to no longer forget days of yore when we most longed to see higher profits. Can we have new Isaiahs awakening calls to see the space between us as sacred soil and everyone's labor as God blessed toil, when we're working to tear down walls. Knowing that we are all tied together with those destiny garments forever.