The Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue gave this sermon for the Convention Eucharist for the 201st Convention of the Diocese of Georgia at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Savannah, Georgia, on November 11, 2022.
God meets us in reality
Isaiah 58: 6-12 and Matthew 25: 31-40
God meets us in reality.
God is not in my idealized past.
God is not in my hoped for future.
The God who made us, loves us, and wants better for us is with us now and in every moment of our very real, sometimes glorious, sometimes messy, lives.
God becoming human in Jesus was all about the Second Person of the Holy Trinity entering into creation, weaving back the tattered tapestry of our world from the inside.
My Mom helped me to see this insight–God is real and deals with our actual lives, not our fantasies.
She has often repeated that phrase: God meets us in reality.
This year, I have heard my mother’s sage counsel differently.
I had a poignant epiphany in September, when I was speaking with Diocesan Council at Trinity Church in Statesboro. Having a light bulb going off over my head as I am in the midst of talking to a group happens to me with some regularity. As an extrovert, I benefit from processing my thoughts externally. I sometimes don’t know what I think, what my deepest and best thoughts are, until I talk a matter through.
I was taking our Council through the process by which Canon Loren Lasch and I separately had arrived at the same conclusion about this convention. We realized that it would be most important to share a clear-eyed view of where the congregations of the Diocese of Georgia are now, after having experienced great shifts during a global pandemic.
In Canon Lasch’s opening presentation and in my Bishop’s Address we have done just that in a way that I trust is hopeful. We have seen the data on our attendance and finances as well as the signs of how God is present with us in the midst of what we face today in our corner of the vineyard, which is the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia. That morning in Statesboro as I told the members of Council about my Mom’s favored phrase, God meets us in reality, the word reality was a hard one to say.
Sixteen months ago, my mother called me to share a frightening incident. She had been sitting at a red light, waiting for the traffic on the state route to go by and the light to turn green. She knew that she was driving to her daughter’s house. That much she remembered. But Mom told me that she realized that she had not the slightest idea which direction to go to get there. My sister, Leigh, has been living in the same home near Arnoldsville, Georgia for 25 years. My Mom, Julia, had been, at that time, living in the same house in Winterville for nearly 20 years. Mom had made that 11.4-mile drive countless times, always making the left hand turn onto US 78. That day, she was stuck. She knew where she wanted to go and yet had no idea what to do next. Soon after, her doctor diagnosed my mother with dementia.
I can’t say strongly enough that she was brave in facing that new reality. My Mom was one of eight children. She had cared for one of her sisters, Laura Frances, as the relentless progression of Alzheimer’s had her sundowning each afternoon. My aunt would be looking for her deceased husband, Joe, and their children, who were by then living in three different states. Mom lovingly looked after her sister until care at home was no longer an option. She had witnessed how far from reality dementia can take someone.
All of this came to me at once as I told the Council that God meets us in reality. What does it mean, I wondered, when our view of what is real suffers distortion. And, as sometimes happens, the next step opened for me. Just as clearly as I could see my mother learning of her dementia diagnosis, I recalled the book that the Lasches gave to me. The Rev. Ian Lasch had been reading the work of John Swinton, a Practical Theologian in Aberdeen, Scotland. He and Loren gave me Swinton’s book Dementia: Living in the Memories of God. So as I spoke, I took that next step, following where I felt the Holy Spirit leading me and I told the members of Diocesan Council of it being difficult to talk of my Mom saying God is with us in reality now that she is less connected to what is real. I let them know of the book in which Swinton explores:
Who am I when I’ve forgotten who I am?
What does it mean to love God and be loved by God when I have forgotten who God is?
His exploration goes far from where my mother is now or may ever be with dementia. Swinton takes the reader to the farthest borders of where the various forms of what we call dementia can take a person. This work of practical theology is so important as it works from what we know of God to puzzle through the implications of our beliefs. If we are each made in the image and likeness of God, what does the loss of memory do to the imago dei, that image of God, imprinted on each person? We are not confined by what we can remember for we are always remembered by God. Even if someone’s cognition is such that they forget God, God never forgets that person. This is the deepest reality even in the furthest reaches of varied conditions we call dementia.
Since that phone call when she could not remember which way to turn, a lot has happened with my Mom. We worked through a variety of possibilities with her and after she visited for a few weeks last December, she decided to move into the apartments with her sister Emily. She pared down her possessions, we sold her house and moved her to Chattanooga. With her sister nearby and the care of the staff at her new home, she has remained as independent as possible. Between medication and a stable routine, my Mom is in a great environment. But it isn’t home. Even though I have been with her there as often as possible and my siblings have visited, the apartment may never feel like home to her. We all do what we can. Her two great grandchildren stayed with her for some days. We will be with her for her birthday later this month. The loss of home remains. Then there is the more difficult reality. Sometimes, when we talk, she does not remember any of us ever being with her in Tennessee.
Swinton’s book, I told the Council, helped me to see the value in spending time with my Mom even, or especially, when she might not recall it later. A visit that makes the hours spent with her better matters so much, whether she remembers it or not. And that time spent with her is good for me, even if she forgets the visit.
It’s not about trying to get my mom to the reality she used to be in, or the exact way our relationship used to be. Going back to the past like that simply cannot happen. What we’re living into now is finding new ways of expressing the love and care we’ve always had for each other, that’s still fully present even though it’s different than it’s been before. I can’t let the loss of abilities prevent me from appreciating my mother as she is now.
The insight that we need to appreciate what we have is, of course, relevant to any situation we face. For people who feel like they have everything under control and life is perfect, the day will come when chaos breaks into that careful order. For followers of Jesus, when our carefully maintained façade of perfection crumbles, we know that our savior remains with us, even in the midst of the chaos. When anxiety overwhelms us, when we face problems with no clear answer, Jesus will never leave us or forsake us.
In our reading from Isaiah, the Children of Israel were living in exile in Babylon trying to hold the faith passed down in families through generations. The prophets had warned that Israelites would not be exempt from the judgment of God if they failed to be faithful. The people did not heed the prophets. Exile came in a traumatic way to Ancient Israel twice, first when the Assyrian Empire took over the northern kingdom of Israel, the land of ten of the twelve tribes of Israel, and again when the Babylonians captured the two tribes of Judah, the southern kingdom of Israel. When our reading takes place, the people were remembering God’s teaching while exiled in an enemy land. The people in exile would have been tempted to think “we can’t find God until we get back to where we were, and how we were.” But they needed to find God anew in exile.
The exile is a central story of the Hebrew Bible. The Children of Israel looked back to the Exodus, when their ancestors were brought out of captivity in Egypt to be returned to the Promised Land. Now in Babylon, they mourned the loss of Zion and longed to be restored once more as God’s people living in the land of Israel.
Our reading from Isaiah was a word from God to remind them that they were always God’s people, no matter where they lived. Then they could trust that God would be faithful, without yet knowing whether they would ever return to their homeland.
God instructed Israel to put their faith into practice if they wanted to find light anew in the darkness all around them. In the words of our reading:
If you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.
The exiles learned once more to faithfully follow the God who made them, loved them, and wanted better for them. They studied scripture and found their faith was born anew as they learned not to long for the past, but to serve God in the here and now.
The lesson to the exiles holds just as true for us. For the light of Christ to shine brightly in our lives and in the midst of our congregations, we know the way–study the scripture together, say our prayers, gather regularly for worship, and serve our communities as if we are serving Jesus himself. As we worship and serve, we are more likely to be attuned to how God is already present among us.
When we put our faith into practice, we remember who we are, which is to know whose we are. For those with dementia, as long as someone remembers them, they are not lost. The Gospel tells us that even if everyone we know were to forget us, each of us lives in the memory of God. Even in exile, we can still serve God in the knowledge that we are never God-forsaken.
The God who will never forget us is with us now. This is true with my Mom’s journey. And as I saw during the Council meeting in Statesboro, it is true for where we are as a diocese. We don’t have to go back to our churches as they were in 2019 to find Jesus present with us, or to 2010 or to 2000 or any other magic date. When we get real with ourselves, we will see how the Holy Spirit is already in our midst, leading and guiding us, not back to a longed for past or even ahead of us in a hoped for future.
The overwhelmingly Good News is that the God who made us, loves us, and wants better for us is with us now and in every moment of our very real, sometimes glorious, sometimes messy, lives.
God meets us in reality.
Amen.
