READINGS:

Summer develops in days. Right now body and soul are making adjustments as our place under the sun shifts. We stand between the times, and there is always much to learn at the boundary. In the midst of summer exuberance, there are silences that call us to return to what is forever essential within us. The earth turns on its axis and time like a current of air moves past, leaving us alone with our thoughts. In the roundel of the seasons, there is never more than a pause. The rising and falling light never stops, and we are carried along on summer winds across the skies, carrying our spirits along on the One Breath that animates everything. ~ from An Almanac for the Soul, reflection by Marv Hiles

Listen to the sound of the genuine within you. It is the only true guide you’ll ever have. If you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls. You will find that there are so many noises and competing demands in your life that you will never find out who you are. If you learn to keep quiet enough to hear the sound of the genuine within you, you will hear it in others as well. ~ from “the Well-Lived Life is a Search for Substance” by Marion Wright Edelman

SCRIPTURE: The Story of King Solomon, 1st Kings

SERMON – Our music this morning reminds me of the two sides of summer: first, the sunny side of leaving our worries by the doorstep as we head out of town or to the pool or just to a different relaxed routine and second, the intermingling of the summer winds, which carry us along the currents of time and change, toward fall. Summer offers me both opportunities: time to live just in the moment at hand and also time to reflect on my life, where I am and where I hope to be.

I was sorting through some old pictures a few weeks ago, and I came across a snapshot of myself when I was about 8 years old wearing my ballet costume, standing up tall on tippy-toe in my first set of toe shoes. My aunt, who was watching, asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I answered, “I want to be a dancer”.

What do you remember as your first answer to that question? Take a moment to share that with the person sitting next to you. You can do this in twosomes or threesomes, but make sure everyone has someone to share with. And when I ring the chime, please direct your attention back here.

You can trace my lifeline by the various ways I have responded to that question.

By age 11, my answer had morphed into “I want to be a Rockette, dancing in New York.” At thirteen I realized I wasn’t going to be tall enough to be a Rockette, so I decided I wanted to be an airline stewardess. At 15, my parents reminded me many times that a woman could be a secretary, a nurse or a teacher – at least until she got married. I have mentioned before that at my parents’ insistence, I took typing and shorthand so I would have something to fall back on if I struck out at everything else in my life.

Meanwhile, I fell in love with poetry and fiction in my high school English classes and from then through college, I focused my dreams on becoming a high school English teacher. And I was, for three years after college, teaching 11th and 12th grade English.

By age 25, I had discovered I loved high schoolers themselves more than loved vocabulary tests, grades, and the restrictions on teachers in that school. I loved sharing poetry and reflection and good discussions with teen-agers, but I needed to be able to do where it was also possible to talk about spirituality and faith. In my later twenties, I became a church youth group leader in our Connecticut church and at UCG, when we moved to Gainesville. Gradually I discovered other things I loved to do in the church: worship and planning and brainstorming and administration and pastoral care and eventually even preaching. All that came together when I finally knew for sure what I wanted to be – and became – was a minister.

I realize, as Jerry Hill mentioned in the children’s story, that when someone asks you what you want to be when you grow up, they really are asking you what do you want to do? And the expected answer is role, a job, a profession, an identity.

When I look back at how many times my answer changed, every step of the way has meant letting go of an earlier vision so that I could move toward a new sense of myself. And every letting go also has meant taking with me all the important learnings and growth I had experienced in the role I was leaving. I am the sum of all those parts of what I have done, all those roles were and are crucial in shaping who I am today.

But I didn’t have young John Lennon’s foresight when he said “When I grow up, I want to be ….. happy.” And I don’t think anyone ever asked me what kind of person, what kind of woman I wanted to be when I grew up. While I planned for retirement, I have to say that, as a retired person when I no longer had a concrete answer of what I wanted to do now that I was really grown up, I recognized that I had to look at that question in a new and different way.

Retirement is a great teacher about identity. At times, I strugglewith not having a concise answer about what I am doing in retirement. In fact, I had a moment of total frustration at a church retreat, when someone kept asking me, repeatedly again and again and again, what I was doing in retirement, and I lost it. I snapped back: “Retirement isn’t about doing, about what I do; it’s about being, about who I am.” And that was truly an aha moment for me. It is an aha, I believe, that is relevant throughout our lives, an aha that life is not just about doing; it is equally about being. That insight would have been as important for me to articulate at age 21 as it is for me to articulate now. What kind of person do I want to be?

President Jimmy Carter is someone I admire greatly for his ability to know and embody the kind of man he is. For years I wanted to attend his Bible Study class at his home church, Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia. Mister Jimmy, as they call him there, teaches this class at 10am every Sunday he is in town. In an effort to cross something off our bucket list this year, Larry and I went there on Sunday, April 23.

We learned that the church doors opened at 7:30am, that we would have to stand in a long line to go through screening by the Secret Service on the way in, and that if we wanted to have a seat in the Sanctuary (which holds about 300 people) where Mr. Jimmy would teach, we’d better get there even earlier than 7:30 or we would wind up sitting in the overflow room or in the outside tent watching the class on a television screen. When we found out that 175 people from the Carter Center Foundation and board were in town as well that Sunday, we set our alarm clock for 4am. We arrived at the church parking lot at 5:15, only to discover that we were already group number 6 in line, not number 1.

But it was worth it to sit in the center of the third row of that Sanctuary, almost face to face with Jimmy Carter. Here was a man who has lived so many roles: a man who grew up poor in the South, served in the US Navy, became a successful peanut farmer and businessman, a husband and father and now grandfather, a Georgia state senator, the Governor of Georgia, the President of the United States, then a defeated candidate for a second term as President. He has had so many incarnations of what he grew up to do and so many moments when he had to let go of what he had done. What struck me so powerfully was the thread of who Jimmy Carter is that runs through his whole life to this day. The man he is – and the person he has chosen to be – is to me as moving, as impressive, as inspirational as his many jobs and roles.

He stood there, almost 92 years of age, speaking cogently and fluently about the Bible lesson for the morning, without a single note in his hand. It was the story of King Solomon from 1st Kings in the Hebrew scriptures, a story that Shelly referenced this spring during our worship theme of “Be Thou My Wisdom” and a story that, with uncanny synchronicity, spoke directly to my discernment about doing and being.

Solomon, you may remember, was the son of King David – the David who killed the giant Goliath, the David who is credited with writing so many of the beautiful Biblical Psalms, King David who had an affair with Bathsheba and then had her husband murdered. Solomon was the child of that affair. When Solomon was a boy on the way to becoming King, God asked him, “What would you like me to give you?” There are a million things Solomon could have asked for, but Solomon answered, “Give me wisdom that I may know the difference between good and evil.” Solomon in effect answers the question of who he wants to be when he grows up, by saying he wants to be a wise person. And for a while he was.

But the years passed, the seasons changed, and Solomon lost sight of what he wanted to be and instead as King pursued what he could do and what he could have. He became obsessed with power, with riches and with women, seven hundred princesses we are told and three hundred concubines. Distracted by his world’s measures of wealth and success, Solomon frittered away his gift of wisdom. He forgot the kind of man he had wished to be.

So Mister Jimmy said, what can we learn from this story of Solomon? And he answered: “I think the most important lesson is that God in effect gives everyone of us the same offer, the same gift God gave to Solomon: the chance to declare what it is we want in life, to choose what is most important to us. No matter what situation we are in, we have the opportunity and the obligation to decide what kind of person we want to be. We can be a success in life according to God by choosing to be a person of integrity, a generous person, someone who tells the truth, someone who is forgiving of those who have hurt them, someone filled with compassion for those who are in need, someone with a commitment to peace. These are characteristics available to all of us and we have that choice of who we want to be. And we need to make it a top priority, seeking it through our prayers and our dreams. It requires humility – the ability to admit when I haven’t measured up and start over again.”

Jimmy Carter’s life embodies that message. He turned a major public defeat on a world-wide stage into a transition that brought together all the threads of the man he is, a man of integrity, of generosity, of commitment, and of service. Carter is for me the living testament that the opportunity to make this choice of who we want to be is not time-limited nor confined any one chapter of our lives, but instead it is a central question for us as women, as men, as young people, as elders – a central question to engage throughout our lifetime.

Summer is a unique season for reflecting on our lives as we transition with the changing winds toward fall. In the course of every summer, there is a moment when we leave something behind as we turn toward something that is ahead: a new grade or a new school for ourselves, or our children or our grandchildren – a new chapter of our work or of our relationships – a new year of our life with new plans and new challenges. Some of us may be changing jobs, or moving to new houses or even to new communities. By September, the landscape will have changed again.

In all of this – the letting go and the continuity – summer offers me the vantage point to consider who I am and invites me to focus again on that priority. And it is wisdom in the service of the kind of person I most want to be that shapes how I will sing my own song and wisdom in the service of who I am that shapes as well the legacy I will leave behind. May it be so.

PRAYER – I invite you to join me in a moment of prayer, beginning with a passage of scripture from the Wisdom of Solomon, a book found in the Catholic Bible. Wisdom is personified as the feminine side of God, and sometimes is referred to as Sophia.

“Wisdom is found by those who seek her and makes herself known to those who long for her. She can be found sitting at the gateways of life in every moment and on every path.”

At this moment, at this gateway of your life, on your path, consider that question: what kind of person do you most want to be? See what words emerge from your heart, from your thoughts – and sit with those words now in silence.

Now form those words into a prayer or an affirmation that you can take with you into the weeks ahead.

Know that God’s grace surrounds you. Blessed be.