A Covenant of Separation

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"A Covenant of Separation"

Genesis 1:1-19
September 18, 2011

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth
was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind
from God swept over the face of the waters.

Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that
the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God
called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was
evening and there was morning, the first day.

And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it
separate the waters from the waters.” So God made the dome and
separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were
above the dome. And it was so. God called the dome Sky. And there was
evening and there was morning, the second day.

And God said, “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one
place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land
Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God
saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation:
plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit
with the seed in it.” And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation:
plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with
the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and
there was morning, the third day.

And God said, “Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the
day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days
and years, and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon
the earth.” And it was so. God made the two great lights—the greater light
to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. God set
them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, to rule over the
day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And
God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning,
the fourth day.

Covenant of Separation

The following covenant was agreed upon by Pastor Kevin and the Church
Council on Monday, September 12.

This covenant will guide the future relationship between the Rev. Kevin J.
McLemore (hereafter referred to as “the pastor”) and the First
Congregational UCC of Coloma, MI (hereafter referred to as ”the church”)
who both understand and accept the terms of this covenant in order that
the relationships with new pastoral staff can develop in positive ways. Both
Pastor & Church Council (on behalf of the congregation) mutually agree to
support the following conditions of the covenant:

1.        As of October 12, 2011, the pastor will relinquish all pastoral and
administrative duties and will no longer function as part of the pastoral or
administrative team of the church.

2.        The pastor is determined to be supportive of future pastoral and lay
leadership of the church and will refuse to receive or participate in any
negative comments, conversations or activities which might undermine any
program or person of the church. When appropriate, open and direct
communication with the new pastoral leader is encouraged.

3.        Any future contacts, which may occur between the pastor and the
congregation, will be as friends and not in a pastor/parishioner relationship.
The pastor will not participate in any weddings, funerals, baptisms, nor
engage in any hospital or pastoral visitation or serving of Holy Communion
unless requested by the Council and the Senior Minister.

As things start to end, as our time with you comes to a close, I’ve noticed
that every week more and more of you begin to try to say good-bye to me,
even though we have three or four Sundays left. Now, as far as I know,
most of you plan to be here over the next three or four Sundays, so it’s not
because you’re going on vacation for the next month, and you wanted get in
your good-byes. So, I suspect its because as October 11 marches towards
us, it becomes more real that on October 16 I will be not in this pulpit, and,
from my vantage point, you will not be the congregation I am helping to
lead. I certainly am feeling the closeness of that time breathing down on my
neck, but I have to say it becomes harder and harder to hear the good-byes
from some of you, because it makes me aware of how truly hard it will not to
be pastoring this church, this congregation, each of you. It also makes me
realize how much I will miss seeing you from week to week, and how I am
personally struggling with the separation that is about to be experienced by
both of us.   And, yet, as I said last week, everything ends and everything
begins again, life and death, and life once again, and death yet one more
time. That seems to be the way of it, the way God has structured the
universe, the world, the cosmos, and despite our attempts to argue with it,
to try to convince it, the universe, to stop this all-too familiar rhythm, it will
not do what we ask it to do, and so it just resumes that too familiar dance,
the one composed of the familiar steps of beginnings and endings.

Now, that doesn’t make it any easier, I think, at least not for me, knowing
that truth, because I still want to be your pastor, I don’t want it to end, I
don’t want to NOT be the one doing the funeral of someone you and I both
care about, and I don’t want NOT to be there for you in a crisis of spirit or
body, because I care and want to just continue with what I have been doing
for some five years now. But that can’t happen, because things end, my
time with you will have ended, and my pastorate in this place will end here,
and I will cease being your pastor and you will cease being someone I pastor,
and our relationship will change forever after that October 11 date. And
because most of us don’t want this relationship to end, because I don’t want
to let go of you and some of you don’t want to let go of me, because we
care for each other, and I love you and many of you love me, love us, me and
Douglas, we’re going to struggle with that separation and what it means.

And so I knew that we needed something, some way of describing what that
new relationship would be like in the future, maybe a document that laid it all
out, some clear understanding of what that separation means, and so, this
past Monday night, the Church Council and I agreed on a Covenant of
Separation, which is actually printed in our bulletin today, in the back end of
it. This isn’t meant to be mean and harsh, for you or for me—it’s simply
meant to clarify what each of us know we need to do, and that, of course, is
change our relationship into something new, to set some boundaries that
weren’t there before, and for me, to acknowledge publicity that I owe you a
chance to go on, and you owe me a chance to go on. And let me be clear
here: I was the one who came up with the idea of putting it down on paper,
and I didn’t do it because I feared you wouldn’t let me go, that you wouldn’t
separate with me, or set boundaries with me, but because I was scared that I
wouldn’t be able to let you go, that I wouldn’t be able to maintain good
boundaries with you in the future, so that we could have some type of
relationship that was different than the one we have now.

But all of us in this room know how difficult it is to do the work of separation
from people that we love and sometimes struggle to love, to create
boundaries with those same people that are life-giving, that allow an “I” and
“me” to exist apart from you, and vice versa. Some have said that the
anxiety that so many people possess is rooted in an unresolved issues
related to their earlier childhood, where we don’t work out a healthy
separation from our mothers or fathers, and that failure simply shows up in
adulthood. All of us have some degree of that—early, early childhood is a
time when there is no distinction between mother and child, between father
and child, in the child’s mind, and when the distinction happens, when the
separation happens between child and parent, as it must, some of us do it
better than others, or our parents struggle to let us be an “I” in relationship
to them. It happens all the way through the teenage years, doesn’t it…the
struggle of the teen to become a full, distinct person separate from the ones
who gave them birth or who raised them from birth.

Separations, boundaries, are part of the human condition, and some of us
are good at knowing where you end and I begin, and some of us, well, some
of us, are not so good at that sort of thing. In reality, we spend our lives
trying to balance both separation and connection, because going to either
extreme is toxic and unhealthy. Think about it: being a self that feels that
one has no or little human connection with others is a recipe for a
psychopath, and, in contrast, when the self feels that they have no identity
apart from their family, their spouse, their job, their community, even their
church, then the result you have is someone with no boundaries with others,
because the people they have fused with have become them, and they have
no problems with attempting to forcibly manage the lives of others. What
you get is another psychopath, but just going in an opposite direction. The
reality is that we need to be separated and yet connected in order to be
healthy people, to be the kind of healthy person that our own Jesus was in
his own dealings with others.

But the work of separating ourselves in a healthy way is what I think most of
us struggle with it, at least in my opinion. Of course, Jesus is that ultimate
model for us, as people of Christian faith, and certainly, if you look at his life,
you can see a person who had an extraordinary ability to be a self, a whole
person, a distinct person, apart from others, his disciples, and yet be deeply
connected to them at the same time. But the work of separation has been
going on way before Jesus was doing it—in fact, it has been there since this
beginning, since the creation of the world, as we just heard in our text
today. Look at the text here: God is separating the light and the dark, the
day and the night, the sky and the earth, the earth from the sea, etc, and
etc. Now, there is clear evidence that the ancient Hebrews who wrote these
words were obsessed with boundaries, and one need only look at the
Levitical laws that were developed later to see how they desired to put
everything in its proper place.

Again, certainly you can go too far with it, this obsession with having
everything in its place, but it does say something about the character of the
people of God, and, frankly, I think it also hints at something else, something
even more interesting. Keep in mind that all of this separation takes place
right at the moment that God is creating the world, that God is being
creative, and doing something new and dynamic. Think about it for a
moment: when God creates, God separates, and something new begins
when something ends, when light and dark are no longer the same but are
separated, when water and earth are no longer the same, but become
distinctive, something new. Creation, creativity, is linked to separation, to
the ability to be different, to be apart, to some degree, from our family, our
spouse, our job, our children, our politics even. And I think that has to do
with the fact that when we do not separate from those that we love, again,
to a certain degree, there is no room for the creative juices to flow, for an
idea to come up that is not just a mirror copy of something we think others,
others like our parents, our children, our politicians, our boss, or whomever,
wants us to think. To breathe, you must have room—and suffocation
happens when something is so close to our mouths and noses as to block
out room for us to get air, block out our ability to actually quite literally live in
this world. We must have room, separation in order to simply live and thrive.

In thinking about this connection between creation, creativity, and
separating, I can’t help but remember the times when I was college student
and would wait until the night before a major paper was due. On the night
before it was due, I would get home, usually from work, and just clean up my
room, separate everything into its proper place or at least into manageable
piles, and then, at around midnight, I would start the paper, and by 8 AM, I
would be finished.   Now, maybe they weren’t the best papers, but what
struck me later in life was this idea that I had to get everything cleaned up
before I could start to write, that everything had to be separated and put in
its proper place before I could even begin to create a term paper from
scratch. I don’t do that as much now—I am more comfortable creating in
chaos, as anyone who has seen my office lately can attest.

What does all this talk of creation and separation really mean for you, for me,
for us, though?   Well, it means that without separation, without us going
our separate ways as pastor and congregation, neither one of us will be able
to live up the calling that God has for each of us. If things don’t end,
nothing ever begins, and if we are unable to embrace the end, if you and I
cling to what once was, no real new story can begin, no new tale can be
spun, about who you are in this place, in this community of faith, and what
God is about to do with you and through you, in the next chapter of your
life. And for me, well, if I cannot end this story, I cannot begin writing a new
story, and letting God write that new story through me, with a new
congregation, who need my attention and in my better moments, my
creativity, it will be a disaster for them and me. This Covenant of Separation,
this boundary setting exists not to simply end something good, but to allow
something else to begin, in you, and me, and in this place, and in my new
congregation.

One final thing I wanted to share with you is how glad I am that your Council
has chosen Pastor Brenda to be your temporary Pastor. As I wrote in the
weekly email I sent out this past week, she is well regarded and well liked by
her colleagues and the churches she has preached at throughout the
Association.   I bring Pastor Brenda up in the context of this sermon because
she is your new beginning and if this pastoral relationship with me does not
end, it will be almost impossible for you to begin a pastoral relationship with
her, to receive the good gifts she has from God that I do not have. All the
creativity she has, all the good gifts she has from God, are missed if they are
muddled up with me, with what has been, and vice versa, in my case—in
Chicago, if the interim minister of that church does not separate from them
in a few weeks and set good boundaries with them, they too might miss
some of the good gifts that God might have for them through me.   A
beginning begins when endings finally come to an end. And as scary as that
might be for you and me, that is the way of it, the way of the world, and
frankly, the way of creation itself. You and I know this truth in our own
lives—so often we can’t begin something new until we have ended something
old, closed that chapter, and so much trouble happens when we don’t have
the courage to do that good and difficult work. And so it ends and so it
begins, and thanks be to God, who meets us at both the beginning and the
end of all things, and everywhere, everywhere in between.    Amen.