I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.

The is one of those sermons that is going to be a little more personal that I like, but all of the words that I have this week are personal and I don’t know how to get around that and still have something to say.

Last Sunday I spoke of the primary gift of God’s Holy Spirit, the gift of communication.

To be able to speak your truth, to tell your story, openly, freely and honestly is beyond most people’s ability, except that God helps us.

For starters, you see, we are each the heroes of our own narrative, giving ourselves more credit and, at times, more blame than any else does.

And the other thing that makes it hard to tell our stories candidly is that others, whom we are trying to communicate with, are too busy constructing their own narratives in ways that are informed by what they know to be true, the experiences that they have had and the interpretations they have made.

And so it is only in relationships of trust, connections of affection, communities of support that sacred communication can happen. It is a process, a gradual process. We start with conversations about the weather and then we grow and mature and the Spirit allows our feeble attempts at using words to become holy and intimate, until we hear and we speak with a clarity that goes beyond the surface truths and we hear that which is deeper than the words we use.

I used to laugh about people who punctuated their sentences with “you know?” until I came to realize that some of the deepest and most important conversations I have had contain the same linguistic inelegance.

You know?

Consider the conversation I had with my cousin this week, he is 13 years older then me and he was, and probably remains, the primary heroic figure in my life, the model, for me, of what a husband, father, son and man should be.

We were together at the funeral of his mother, my aunt.

Our roles were clear, he was there to mourn, I was there to conduct the funeral.

And here is a verbatim account of the conversation:
I said to him, one inarticulate Jersey guy talking it another, “How you doing?”
He replied “OK, yeah, OK.”
I, showing off not only my college education, but my seminary education and a life time of highly focused counseling and writing skills, I said “Yeah?”
He, demonstrating that he is a highly educated graduate of the United State Military Academy at West Point, he answers me,
“Yeah, you know.”

Ten words! That’s it. Ten words – actually only six unique words - and yet, we knew. We knew our roles, we knew our duties, we knew that – and I’ll put the language to this, it is my field, he would probably just nod and say “right” adding a 7th unique word to our shared vocabulary – we knew, both of us, there is a bond and a connection that we let slide, often, in the busyness of life, yet when there was a need that bond and connection were there, we knew that the Spirit of God was communicating everything that we needed to know, and it went way beyond words.

It’s been a heavy week for me in terms of memories, I let myself wallow in this list that you have in the bulletin, I thought about my aunt and her whole generation that is now gone on my mother’s side of the family, I thought about all of the times when we have gathered here to say goodbye to those we thought we couldn’t get by without.

But it has been a good week of memories as well, I watched the daughters of my cousins, five bright and charming women who had two stories to tell: the first was how much they loved their grandmother and the second was that they knew – without a doubt – how much their grandmother loved them.

And then I watched, yesterday, as the children of our cousins on Deb’s side hosted a party to honor their parents for 40 years of marriage, to each other, and to anticipate their move to North Carolina for retirement. And I found myself remembering all of our crazy vacation trips and the restaurants and golf courses and beaches and bays that we have explored and how that will soon be changed, and the memories rolled over me.

God’s Holy Spirit, the one whose first gift is to allow us to hear each other in the context of our lives, provided her second great gift, the gift of memory.

And not all of the memories are wonderful, there is pain in story telling and story hearing, I saw relatives whom I haven’t seen in a long time, and they were not at all interested in my story, they already have a story about me that they know and they wouldn’t want to change it.

But all of that is part of my story as well, all of that is part of what and who I have been on my way to being what and who I am. And I tell you this, not to encourage you to speculate on the smiles and tears of my life, that would be fairly uninteresting to anyone else I would think, but I tell you this to encourage you to remember the smiles and tears of your own life, to be grateful for the people you don’t have anymore and to cherish the ones you do.

These are the gifts of the Holy Spirit, communication and memory.

But God’s gifts are not bound to time.

Just as we use the ancient words of Hebrew and Greek scripture so we use the wonders of Email and – much to my surprise – you can even become a fan of Clover Hill on Facebook. I would describe what you see on our Facebook page as shallow and trivial, but actually it’s pretty profound – for Facebook.

And whatever comes next we will find ways of communicating the old and unchanging truths in new and ever changing ways. And just as time doesn’t limit God’s gift of communication, so time doesn’t limit God’s gift of memory.

I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.

There are memories yet to come.

And I saw that this week as well, I played with the Little Red Headed Girl and I saw tomorrow and she was holding a bat and swinging at a ball and pulling on crab traps and wearing a cap and gown.

And I saw caskets and flowers and tears; and I saw white lace and more flowers and more tears; I saw all these little babies we’ve been baptizing holding new Bibles and asking me, as Courtney Dai did last week “where’s a good place to start reading?” and I showed them, as I showed her, the 23rd Psalm and said start there.

God’s not done.

Not with us, not with the church and not with the world, there’s too much still in front of us, too many things that we couldn’t bear if we knew what they were.

So we just have hints and guesses and the sound of a distant call to our hearts and the faith that there are memories yet to come, different and wonderful memories that God is creating for us, when we learn to trust him and to rest ourselves in him and to stop trying to micromanage the universe.

Today we start the summer season, earlier worship, later dinners a different pace of life. Allow yourself to appreciate, this summer, just who are what you are, not only in your life, but in the lives of others. It’s a good time to recognize the truth of Romans: we have peace with God.

Not “we will have peace with God when we die and go to heaven” but we have peace with God.

Present, past and future.

Until you believe that, and summer is the best time to become aware of that, but until you believe that your memories will haunt you and bring you no peace, your dreams will elude you and bring you no peace.

But when you have reconciled yourself with who you have been and who you can become, then you will have peace. In the recent mythological TV series Lost, one of the final scenes shows the characters who have accepted themselves, with all of their flaws, gathering together. And I’m trying not to give anything away in case you haven’t had time to fire up the Tivo, but one of the characters, perhaps the least moral character, Ben Linus, sits outside and when he is invited in he responds, “No, I’ve got some things to take care of.” That’s how it is, every day.

If we have things that we haven’t taken care of, if we haven’t accepted the peace and forgiveness of God, if our memories – happy or sad – don’t touch our hearts, and if the dreams of things yet to come, the memories yet to be remembered, don’t inspire us, we can’t fully live, we just sit outside of life and watch.

Yes, I wallowed in some memories this week, and some of them hurt, but I found the truth of Paul’s words to the Romans: suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope and hope does not disappoint us; and so, somewhere between Proust’s “Memories of Things Past” and Buffet’s “Too much to see, waiting in front of me”, we can find a peace with who we’ve been and who are yet becoming and most especially with who I am right now and you have that same peace available to you, when you need it, when you are ready to bear it.

I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.