... be content with what you have, because God has said, "Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you." So we say with confidence, "The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can mere mortals do to me?" Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.
(Hebrews 13:5b-8)
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Today is the first day of summer. The seasons change. They never stop. In a few unfortunately short weeks, it will be fall, and not too long after that, winter. Then will come spring and summer again. A constant cycle of change from one season to the next. It's the way of the world. Everything changes. I suppose you’d have to say that it’s one of the most obvious axioms of life: everything changes. It’s been put in various ways by various people. Louis L’Amour - a famous American author best known for westerns but who wrote in a variety of genres and was known as "America’s storyteller" - perhaps put it best when he said that "the only thing that never changes is that everything changes." Change is inevitable - and it happens everywhere. The world changes, the church changes, people change. It’s just reality. We may see change for the better - and perhaps sometimes we see the changes in other ways - but we can’t deny the reality of change. It confronts us every day of our lives.
There’s a lot of change happening right now at Central United Church. I don’t have to tell you that, either. Today, as we celebrate Bob’s 35 years of music ministry and as we wish him well on his retirement, we’re confronted by change - and within a couple of weeks from today Central is going to be a very different place. To what end? I suppose that’s the question isn’t it as the congregation begins a cycle of three weeks in a row marked by change. Bob will retire and Darlene will step in. I’ll move on and Donna Howlett will step in. And in one sense things won’t change too much - I suspect that somehow Central United Church will survive without Bob and I and at 10:00 every Sunday morning there will still be a collection of faithful people who gather together to worship God. But in a way everything will be different, because ultimately church is about people - and as people come and go the church changes. Is that good or bad? It’s probably neither. It’s just inevitable. It’s something we have to adjust to. Today is never exactly the same as yesterday, and tomorrow simply will not be today. There will be change. The only thing that really matters is how we respond to change - do we embrace it, or do we try to flee from it?
As hard as we might find it to embrace change, change is important. That which is new comes from something that was old; that which will be comes from that which was. Everything we are today is the result of a lifetime of change. We move through the stages of life: infancy, childhood, adulthood, old age - and, yes, eventually death. Those are all changes. But as Christians we believe that even death doesn’t put an end to us; it just changes us. And the way we live our life and manage these transitions represent the impact we have on others - which we all hope is for the better. The Indian author Amit Ray wrote that "in every change, in every falling leaf there is some pain, some beauty. And that's the way new leaves grow." Even the changes that seem to us to be the hardest to accept and the most difficult to get through lead us to something. For some people, I suppose change seems like an enemy - something to be avoided and fought against. We want everything to stay the same, at least in our nice, comfortable little corner of the world. But change shouldn’t be an enemy. Change should be a companion - it should be the thing that leads us into wonder and curiosity, because there will always be something new awaiting us - new adventures, new people, new experiences. As Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians, "if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!" And I’m not convinced that Paul just saw that as a one time thing. He understood that even Christian life was a never ending progression moving us always closer to Christ.
So it’s right there in the Bible. Change is inevitable. We should be able to embrace it - but, really, we can’t. At least not very often. Change may be inevitable, and it may lead to something good, but we don’t know what the process is going to be for getting us there - and that piece of mystery that’s involved in constant change means that more often than not change is frightening. The reality is that when you’re comfortable and settled, you want things to stay the way they are. Sometimes even if you’re not comfortable and settled, you want things to stay the way they are because you’re afraid they might get worse. "Better the devil you know …" as has been said - although I don’t think I’d want to use that analogy specifically with regard to either Bob or myself! But there is a certain comfort involved in seeing the same faces around you and knowing basically what to expect from them. And when that changes, it can be very unsettling - whether it’s in the church or in life in general. And, while there are many other reasons, maybe that’s at least one reason that God sent Jesus.
I find myself thinking about an old gospel hymn:
Will your anchor hold in the storms of life,
When the clouds unfold their wings of strife,
When the strong tides lift and the cables strain,
Will your anchor drift or firm remain?
And then the song goes on: "we have an anchor that keeps the soul steadfast and sure while the billows roll." The anchor is Jesus - the same Jesus who, as we read in Hebrews, "is the same yesterday, today and forever." Sometimes in the midst of all the change swirling around, you need an anchor. Hebrews tells us to "remember [our] leaders" - and I guess Bob and I qualify on that count - but Hebrews emphasizes even more that we need to look to Jesus as our anchor. He’s "the same, yesterday, today and forever." People come and go - music directors and ministers and everybody else quite frankly - but Jesus is always here. He’s the anchor. No matter what other things change, Jesus is always with us.
It’s been written that "you’ll never be the same person you are now ever again because every day, everything changes." The same thing can be said about the church. It’s never the same week by week. Any congregation on any given Sunday is just a snapshot of that portion of the people of God at that particular moment in time and it can never be perfectly recaptured, because change just keeps coming - and it keeps coming quickly. More quickly as time goes on it seems, and in order to get along, you need something to give you a reference point, a framework, an identity. You can’t know where you’re going or what you’re going to do until you know where you are. Jesus is that for us. He’s the one who is "the same, yesterday, today and forever." He’s the calm in the midst of the storm of change that’s constantly blowing around us. He not only tells us where we are, he tells us whose we are. We are the ever changing children of the unchanging God, who holds us close forever.
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