Letter to Congregation about Leaving St. Peter's

Dear Friends and Members of St. Peter’s,

Nowadays, it’s hard for me not to think about anything church related without a tinge of sadness. Anything I do in church lately is preceded by the word ‘last’. When I visited one of our homebound members the other day she asked me, “Will you come back to see me again?” It was hard for me to say ‘no’, and I said, ‘surely’. I hope I will be able to.  At the recent Vestry meeting, when we talked about intentional relationships, it dawned on me how I, as a priest and as a believer, am profoundly connected to the relationships I have with each of you. I am defined and shaped by our relationships and our connections. This is what I am going to miss the most when I leave St. Peter’s in a few weeks.  

This past Sunday’s lesson is about doubting Thomas’ encounter with the Risen Christ. We don’t know why Thomas was not with his fellow disciples on Easter Day when Jesus first appeared to them. Perhaps, he was dealing alone with his pain away from everyone. However, once he was back in relationship with his brothers and they shared with him their experience of the Risen Christ, he doubted and demanded to have his own experience to believe their account. This led to the most intimate scene of his encounter with the Risen Lord. It was so close an encounter that Thomas could see and touch all the unhealed wounds of Jesus. It was so powerful and profound that instantly made Thomas to make the greatest confession, “My Lord and my God.” Thomas’s re-connection and relationship with his brothers and with the risen Lord, transformed him, defined him and shaped him, and eventually made him to be the great apostle of Jesus Christ to India.  

In these waning days of our time here at St. Peter’s, I look back and thank God for all these past few years of our life together. I believe it was the work of the Holy Spirit that brought me, an outlier in many respects, to you, as your priest. What a privilege it has been to be invited into your lives, to hear your stories and struggles, and to journey with you a little while. As we have ministered together in our church and in the community, we also have ministered to each other through our relationships and connections with each other. We have witnessed, touched, and healed the wounds of the Risen Lord in each other. We have been wounded healers to one another. In doing so, we confessed the Risen Lord like Thomas, “My Lord and my God”. 

Our relationship with each of you is about to undergo a change, a change that will test the verity of the notion whether distance makes our hearts grow fonder. Our relationship will experience a transformation and how it will be post retirement is something we have yet to figure out. As you know June 9, Pentecost, will be our last Sunday at St. Peter’s.  On this day, the Rev. Shawn Wamsley, Canon to the Ordinary, will come to the church and preside over the Liturgy of The Ending of A Pastoral Relationship. June 9 is an appropriate day for this liturgy as it is both Pentecost as well as the anniversary of my Ordination to Priesthood.  Our Easter faith emboldened by the Holy Spirit of Pentecost will beckon us to places where the Risen Lord has already gone ahead of us. 

It is my hope and prayer that I will be able to see each of you in the next few Sundays.

Blessings,

Koshy 

My Last Easter Sermon at St. Peter's

Alleluia, Christ is Risen! The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia. Do we realize this that we wouldn’t be saying this had Mary gotten what she had wished for?  Just indulge with me this morning for few moments imagining a what if scene. A what if scene that morning 2000 years ago when Mary went to look for Jesus’s dead body in that tomb and had found it as she had hoped for. If she did, we would not be sitting here this morning and shouting “Alleluia, Christ is Risen! The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia”.If there was no resurrection, there would not have been a Christian faith, no Christmas, no Easter for us to come to church; I also wonder today what religion we would have been adherents of. If Mary had found Jesus dead body as she was hoping for, she would have given Jesus’ body a proper burial with all the incense and proper care, and the story ended right then and there.  This is one of those instances when it is better that God does not grant us what we pray for or hope for.  

Many of us are like Mary, weeping and sad, and keep looking into the tombs of our past for affirmations of what we are grieving for, feeling sad about, bitter about, and angry at.  We are like the caged birds even when they are free and not in cages, they still hang around the cage.  This was what Paul saw among the Corinthians when he said, “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ we are of all people most to be pitied.” That Easter morning Mary got something far more superior than anything she could have hoped for or imagined, she saw the risen Lord to her utter amazement and absolute joy.  And the Risen Lord appointed her to be the one to go and tell his men disciples that she had seen the Lord.  In Matthew’s account of the resurrection story, she was supposed to tell the disciples to meet the Risen Lord, in Galilee.  In other words, don’t look for Jesus in the tomb or in the grave anymore. Still, Peter and John looked for Jesus in the grave and of course, couldn’t find. Risen Lord is not hanging around in the grave, and in fact, the Risen Lord was telling them that He was going ahead of them. Friends, let us not short change ourselves for Jesus dead body. Our natural tendency is to worship a relic of the past by making a shrine or a cage for a dead god and going on a pilgrimage to the site every year to show our faith or belief in it. Friends, we believe in a God who is active and fully engaged in this world of ours. God does so through us, through the Holy Spirit. 

Now, after resurrection, each one of us is like Mary, who has been touched by the Risen Lord. No longer our vision is too limited, too narrow, no longer we set our sights too low. Now we can think big, make BHAG, big, hairy, audacious goal. Our resurrection faith is no longer cooped up in a stingy tomb, we are let loose like our Risen Lord. Yes, and just like our Risen Lord, we have our own wounds and our own battle scars, but we are not dead, we are Easter people, we are a people of hope, we are healers, we are healers with wounds, we’re wounded healers and reconcilers in the world.

            I may have said this before about a former parishioner who wrote me a letter years after I had served her parish for a very short time as an intern. I received her letter on a day I was experiencing doubt about the effectiveness of my ministry. I had to read a couple of times to recall her face. Then it all came back to me.  At that time, she was a woman in her early seventies and had been in an unhappy marriage for years.  She always seemed moody and sad while I was there. There was no joy in her face, always fearful and unsure about her abilities. She was one of the regulars in the Bible Study I led at the church. I was surprised to receive a letter from her.  In it she wrote how her life had changed.  She wrote how she and her husband had reconciled shortly before his death.  And since his passing she went back to college, finished her masters, something she always wanted to do, and that she now was working as a volunteer tutor to inner city kids in Boston. It was a resurrection for her, a new life of hope and possibilities, a life with meaning and purpose.  She wanted me to know how attending the Bible Study helped her to have the courage to face the demons in her life and how things had turned around for her.  Another resurrection. 

Friends, my own vocation as a priest is a resurrection story. I knew about my call to ministry at a young age, I came to the US to study in order to become a minister like my grandfather. However, after finishing my education in seminary, I became less and less interested in pursuing my religious vocation, and instead, looking into more financially lucrative vocations. I was kind of like Jonah, who rather than following what he was preordained for, sought his own interest.  Though I wasn’t swallowed by a big fish like Jonah was, I began to feel how it would be like in the belly of a fish.  After a lot of soul searching and peering into the abyss of my own tomb, I saw the light and trusted hearing my own name being called out, “Koshy, it is time for you to go and tell your people, that the Lord is Risen. It is time for you to go and teach your people the resurrection faith.”  He also wanted me to know that the Lord is going ahead of me in my ministry, leading me and guiding me.   Yes, I experienced resurrection in my life, and in my vocation as a priest. And much of that resurrection ministry, I am happy to tell you, on these waning days of my sojourn with you my friends, happened right here among all of you. God has brought us together, to share our resurrection faith with each other and with the people of our community. Together we proclaimed the good news of God in Christ, the Easter story, in Phoenixville and beyond.  

Alleluia, Christ is risen, the Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia!