The Church of the Floating Jesus

Yesterday I attended a funeral – one of those sudden and unexpected deaths that don’t make sense this side of heaven.  A vibrant, full of life, wife and mother collapses without warning and is gone.  Three college/early career age children speak tenderly, and humorously, at the service.  I remember them as toddlers in my Sunday School class and my heart breaks for them.  A husband, so enjoying this stage of their marriage, is denied the joy of growing old with the woman he found so amazing.   Her name is Holly – and the years that eroded the amount of contact we had after I moved away from Atlanta 20 years ago did not diminish that she had a bigger impact on me than she probably ever knew.  If you have a couple of minutes, read her “resume”.  It’s how she introduced herself to potential schools and I promise you it’s unlike anything you’ve ever read in a resume.
 
The funeral was at the church I attended when I lived in Georgia back then.  It was the place where I’d known Holly and had taught her children in Sunday School.  But it is also the place where God powerfully shaped me.  And those memories flooded me as I sat there.
 
Father Gray challenged me spiritually and intellectually in a way that opened new worlds to me.  He affirmed ministry gifts in me and encouraged me to step into them, even when I was tentative about doing so.  Even after we moved to Connecticut, he remained a mentor and counselor.  He’s the one who taught me how to navigate some painful relationships – who encouraged me to be truthful instead of always defaulting to “nice”.  He taught me to look poor people in the eye because it treated them with an appropriate dignity.
 
And there was Nancy, who as Christian Education Director, spoke life and courage into me when I was timid, shy and fearful even in my 30s.  She was a mentor in ways that went so far beyond Christian Education.  She drew out gifts in me – not by pushing me from behind into the unknown, but by standing in front, reaching back, grabbing my hand and playfully leading me forward.  Since retiring from the church, she has become an accomplished artist and one of my most treasured possessions is a portrait she did of my kids for my 40^th birthday.
 
So many more people and so many more things – it’s where I learned about community and about corporate (not just individual) worship and sin and prayer.  It was my first experience in a liturgical church and I discovered an unexpected richness in that.  It fed something in me that I hadn’t even realized was hungry and it connected me more deeply than I’d ever been to the saints who have gone before me. 
 
It’s the place where I began to come into a sense of who I was, that laid the foundation for all my future ministry, that gave me the tools that years later helped me walk through healing when my life fell apart. 

It opened my eyes to a God who cares about people I’d given little thought to. 
 
It is where I began to believe that God likes me – which somehow felt more personal and more amazing than the generic “love” I’d grown up hearing about.
 
So why the “floating Jesus”?  It’s not the actual name of the church.  But it’s what one of my preschool Sunday School students called the magnificent sculpture that grabs your attention when you walk into the sanctuary.  In an odd way, that I can’t quite explain, the powerfulness of that sculpture washed over me in long forgotten ways yesterday.  This is no wimpy Jesus.  This is a Jesus I want to know and follow.  One that I can be honest with and still know that I can rely on Him.  [He’s also a fun loving Jesus.  Every year on Pentecost we’d walk into the sanctuary and see Him holding a bunch of balloons.]
 
And Father Gray, in the homily, reminded us that this is the Jesus we release Holly to.  The program for the service says this:  “Christians believe in eternal life through Jesus Christ.  We believed that even before Holly was taken from us.  Today we draw upon that faith and upon its source for strength. … This service is not intended primarily to convey emotional comfort to the bereaved.  This community is presently seeking to do that in other ways over a longer period of time.  This service is shaped to permit us together to do something equally difficult and necessary:  to give God our permission to hold and care for Holly on our behalf. … We are doing this together, not as isolated individuals.”
 
There was something holy about being part of that.
 
And there’s something humbling, in a sacred way, about remembering the wide variety of gifts given to me by that particular place and that particular community.  I am who I am because of my time there.