Tenth Anniversary Toast

by Caleb Clardy, Founding Pastor of Trinity Grace Church, September 14, 2019

How do you as the old letters say, make plain the administration of the mystery? Are there filing cabinets for the cosmic folds of time? Can you smile and shake a hand and tell the deepest secret the world has ever known with a straight face? Can you find that your shoes squeak on the lacquered floor as you shift into the aisle and make your way towards the table? Can you see a few soaking crumbs in the cup from the ones before you and still take and eat and drink and walk back to a wooden folding chair in the center of an ancient unbreakable promise of love beyond description? Can you make sense of the passage of time? 

It is three steps down from the door to the sidewalk in the front of our building. The sun is draping the street, but its midsummer heat has waned, given in. The crisp and barely blinking Autumn has hinted she will stop by but probably can’t stay. I am walking. I am carrying my father’s briefcase, a bruised leather relic that is not ashamed to mark the passing years. There is some fraying around the zipper and you have to be careful as you close it. It is somehow sturdy and vulnerable and the same time.

The sidewalk narrows as I turn onto 8th St. and the steps of the brownstones assert themselves towards the road. The walkway narrows again at each small fenced-in tree hold. The quality of light seems unique to the season changing, but there is still plenty of summer shade. People are out, but not many. They move slowly and deliberately on Sunday mornings, a bit suspicious of others disturbing the day when it is still early.

These streets have changed in the last thirty years as much as any in the country. Those who have seen the changes up close wear a weathered pride about it. They are not pleased with all that has transpired and most of them will tell you exactly how it used to be. I have put in a decade and a half, but like many of my neighbors I am from somewhere else. A city of imposters.

The gradual slope makes walking easy and there is still plenty of time. I try to remind myself to notice things. I can hear my shoes against the pavement different than during the week, the leather soles have a slight crunch. I am passing my neighbors. They are still asleep or waking up into all manner of lives. I am going to a middle school on a Sunday on purpose. I recede back into my thoughts. My feet know the way. I consider the words I will have to say.

The familiarity of the farmers market on the corner outside of the school pulls me back. They are selling gourmet pickles and there are several apple varieties available to sample. There is kale, plies of it, lush and miraculous, a citizen of the neighborhood. Already tote bags are being filled as I pass.

The doors of the school are official, heavy, industrial things with layers of military green paint. If the wind is up, they require a bit of leverage to pull open. School is not in session, but the doors are unlocked. Inside is a formidable lobby that is in a process of transformation. The place will go from a vacant middle school to a church for a few hours this morning. 

There is a buzz of preparation, some praying, some hoisting portable speakers on to stands. Musicians are preparing for a brief rehearsal. I pass left through another set of doors, into an auditorium, a sanctuary, a home, a family room, a patch of fabric in a vast tapestry across time. On this morning we will have church again, like the week before. We will gather as the manifold wisdom of God on display across the firmament and as the spectacular ordinary people of Brooklyn from all places and from around the corner. 

Any one of us can only recall a portion of what has happened here, what has happened as we have lived across our city, what has happened as we have filled and emptied this room over the years. Improbable life has sprung up. People have met God for the first time like a friend and gone under the waters. People have sung out their pain, veins bulging from their necks and choking on tears.  People have been embraced by a life saving freedom collapsing into grace and the arms of a friend. People have wrestled with doubt. People have lived exuberant in faith. People have moved in, moved away, fallen in and out of love, held up new babies, and been strong for a grown child walking out the door. Strangers have become friends have become family. New songs have been written. Old songs have been leaned on. People have shared strong coffee, cold water, the silence of a funeral, and a raised glass across the wedding hall. Bread, and wine. 

God the Father. God the Son. God the Holy Spirit. Jesus saves you see, just like they said in the subway and you are really invited. God is making people into a most unexpected and forever family and having them meet up in the most ordinary ways, in closed middle schools opened for a few hours, church. 

As soon as you try to pin words onto a decade of life you realize you are missing something, but memory always works like this. We can only recall the fragments. We can barely re-enter and so we have to keep going forward swapping stories. I was in a cheap hotel on the side of the highway in the middle of a temperate winter when the God from the old tales I had always heard really spoke to me. I am not sure I would have made it to New York without that. And everyone has a story, a way their path was woven in.

We have met in living rooms. We have met in dusty rented halls. We have met in basements and unfinished offices. We have met in the park. We have met before school and after work and even on lunch. We have met on Sundays and Tuesdays and Wednesdays and even Friday nights. We have sang polka hymns on Christmas eve across from the book store, and we have taken flowers to the hospital. We have been around for a long time and each week we are starting over. We have an old story, a brief history, and more than enough room for you. We have washed feet on Maundy Thursday, kept the vigil on Good Friday, and gotten up early to raise our hands on Easter morning. Because here is the thing, God’s love really is better than life.

All glory to God is what we say and that is right. But as you get a taste of the glory of God, you find out God is not insecure, God is always sharing. God is inviting in, and lifting up, and pouring out. God is a life giver, abundant and not scarce. 

Ten years ago we started a church, but of course there was already church and she will always be  - gathered across our city and across the spaces of place and time. We do not have to be better or judge ourselves as worse because God can be here, a full embrace and God is still enough for everyone everywhere. We opened up one seam, one stumble of steps of obedience and blundering and making it up as we go along divinely guided and experimenting. 

A church is a family, is a temple. It is a body. She is a bride. It is brothers and sisters and a place for strangers. It is full of spiritual mothers and fathers. It may turn a vacant lot into a garden, an empty table into a party, a secret hope into a prayer, A church may lose her place and get stronger, may change her name and stay familiar. 

Ten years ago we started a church. We were supported and loved and guided and helped. And we got to support and love and guide and help. We have seen other churches form. We have received and passed along. We have gotten to drink deeply and show others to the well. Not everyone who began with us is still here and not everyone who will carry us forward has arrived yet. We are somewhere in the middle, but thank God we don’t know exactly where. There is so much we cannot see and that is good. We cannot measure our vapor. We cannot see where every ripple goes. Our invitation is to the present, to some mystery of ongoing connection, to abiding with one whose love is long and high and deep and wide, surpassing knowledge. 

It is written that Christ once prayed a prayer in a crucial hour, once made a request of the Father that all they had shared would be on offer, that the electric and rarified love between the persons of God would given away without being diminished. We were on the lips of Jesus then, along with so many others, to be the recipients of Trinity grace, redeeming, healing, life pouring from the center of the unmatched nature of God. For a decade now we have know some of our part of the answer to that prayer, but there is more to come. It could be that we are just getting started. 

Some of you remember the first people we ever baptized, the first parties we ever threw, the first prayers we ever uttered, the first dollars we ever gave. Some of you were there for the first weddings we ever stood for, the first babies we ever dedicated, the first kids we ever sent off to school. Some of you dreamt up the first projects we ever worked on, the first songs we ever sang. Some of you have worked your fingers to the bone, your spirits to the edge, and given so much of yourself to make life happen here. Some of you have soaked the ground with your prayers, with your tears, and with your hopes for years. It could be that we are just getting started.

There are others who need to know that they are known and loved, others who need Gospel life. There are others who need to be welcomed in, to know their worst failures or most painful wounds are not the final words about their life. We must become poor for the sake of the poor, must show true riches to those who imagine they have it all. Justice must roll down like a river even it is only a tiny stream now.

There are miracles remaining, quiet moments of gathered prayer, secret generosities, healing conversations, surgically prophetic words, stubborn expressions of faith, rekindled hope. We are those acquainted with grief but anointed with joy. We will go as followers of Jesus extending the invitation. We will offer welcome as those whose failures have been redeemed. The world is not yet as it will be and so we have more to do, but also more to be.

We are here to mark ten years of life. Together. With God. In Brooklyn. We are here to say thank you to our God and to ask for more! As recipients of Trinity Grace - Will you raise a glass with me in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In Brooklyn as it is in Heaven!