Partings are difficult moments, loaded with mixed feelings and a sense of what the next day, the next week, the next year will be like. I have been privileged to serve among you for these seven years and some, and many moments with you have shaped me, and, from words you have shared with me, or written down and sent to me, my presence has mattered to you, too. But change has come, and while that’s a mixed bag, the good news is that our God uses every opportunity to bring grace into play, and maybe especially moments of significant change.

And so, I could not have asked for a better text for today then John’s story of Jesus’ tantrum in the temple. My take on it this particular morning is this: the people, and not just the moneychangers, had become so used to way things were, so entrenched in familiar ways of being religious, that they didn’t see how they were missing the whole point of being religious in the first place. Jesus saw it, and it made him angry, and he rushes in and drives out the animals, turns over tables, scatters coins, and generally creates chaos. Imagine being there. How startling and disorienting that moment must have been: for the moneychangers, for the patrons, and even for the disciples, who weren’t used to seeing Jesus so enraged. And in the midst of the chaos, Jesus shouts words to the effect of “Faith in God isn’t about this! God can resurrect lives and you’re wasting time playing games.”

In a dramatic way, Jesus brings significant change to the normal, and people must have freaked out: not just because of the spectacular display of righteous rage in that moment, but because Jesus was disrupting familiar ways of thinking and feeling and acting. And the fact is, as I suggested to the kids, you and I, probably like the characters in our story, don’t like disruptions either, don’t relish change—no matter how it comes. But it does come. Much as we try to stay in control, things don’t stay the same, and there are times when change comes and the neat tables in our lives, with carefully stacked piles of habits and assumptions and activities, are turned upside down.

We should note that this story of the cleansing of the temple appears in all four gospels, but in Matthew, Mark and Luke, it comes at the end of their stories, at the beginning of the last week of Jesus’ life. In John it’s right there at the beginning, right after Jesus’ first miracle at the wedding in Cana, right there in chapter 2. John is making a point: at the heart of Jesus’ ministry is disruption, and to follow Jesus is to accept change—maybe even to embrace it—with faith that God is in charge of that mysterious unknown on the other side of the familiar. In fact, we could go so far as to say that resisting change, getting too familiar with one way of living, can actually impede the grace of God in our lives, until God has no choice to use moments of dramatic, disorienting change to get our attention.

I picked three of my favorite hymns for this morning, and the last we’ll be singing is “In the Midst of New Dimensions.” I love that hymn because, brothers and sisters, there are times life unfolds in ways that send us to new dimensions of human experience. In every life there come moments of extreme disorientation, when everything familiar changes in an instant. Lots of people don’t want to go there, but Christians choose to accept those experiences trusting that God is still God no matter in what new state one finds oneself. And not only that, but in those new places of dramatic change, when the tables have been toppled, we are most open to starting fresh, to paying more attention to God’s guidance, to tapping into that resurrecting power.

I want to describe for you three moments in my own life when I found myself in the midst of a new dimension. I can’t say I handled them all well at the time, but looking back, I see how out of apparent chaos God gave clarity and focus that I would never have come to without the forced experience of change.

One Sunday morning when I was eleven, and we were, literally, getting ready to go to church at 10:00, the phone rang. It was Dr. Anton saying that my mother’s mother, who was in a nursing home in town, had died. This was my first death, and I was pretty stunned. Not so much sad as shocked that my grandmother had actually died. My mother hung up the phone, and I listened to her and my father talk in the next room. My father was assuming we wouldn’t go to church, but I vividly remember my mother saying, “No, let’s go, I can think better at church.” And so we went, and as a family sat in our regular pew on a morning on which for me, everything was unfamiliar.

In the moment the phone rang I was catapulted into a world in which death was now something real, something that actually happened. But also in that very unfamiliar world, there was simultaneously the reality—revealed to me by my mother’s response and the experience of sitting in church—that sanctuary existed, and the possibility that God could make a difference. I didn’t know all that right then, but in the midst of that new dimension, that significant change, God got a firmer hold on me and started to shape me.

Jump forward nearly twenty years to Yale New Haven Hospital. Sam has just arrived on a June morning, and I find myself in yet another new dimension. Skyler, I love you, and your birthday was amazing in its own way, but the arrival of one’s first child is quite unique. Even with a pregnant wife, it was only at that moment that the concept of fatherhood became something real. I had a hard time holding a thought in my head on the way home that night, partly because I was happy, partly because I was actually quite scared, and partly because I knew that one course of my life was pretty firmly defined for the next twenty or so years. The sense of responsibility and possibility was disorienting, and I found myself leaning a bit more intently on God for the wisdom to do it right.

And then, seven and a half years ago, there was an aerial attack on the United States that was a national version of upended tables in the temple courtyard. Security, normality, and confidence were shattered, and the accounts of people’s experience in the days that followed clearly indicate profound shock, literal disorientation. And for a time, the population became of one mind in a way we hadn’t seen. In a way, God’s priorities became the nation’s priorities—connection, support, focus on basics—and those weeks of grace helped us through. For me the day was one of great change not only as an American, but also because my arrival here in Rocky Hill was unexpectedly on that day. The arrival I had anticipated and planned for was now something altogether different. Our meeting, our bond, our shared ministry was forged at an extraordinary moment of change, and God used that first encounter to give shape to the relationship we’ve enjoyed as pastor and people. The neatly planned agenda I had written out and placed on the table in front of me was instantly upended and scattered to the wind, as if Jesus came by and flipped it, saying, “No, something more important than your thoughtful plan has come up. Get to work.” And our work together in these years has reflected the profound change that was at its genesis.

In a much less dramatic way, but one that still needs to be acknowledged, my departure has upended the table on which the ministry of this church has been percolating along nicely. Even given what I said last week about the ministry not being about me or about Donna, even without hanging the crepe, if nothing else, a minister leaving disrupts the familiar, it brings change, it complicates things. But friends, I am convinced that this is one of those moments when God can do God’s most amazing work—if you’ll choose to be led by—as our closing hymn describes—the rainbow and the fiery pillar of God going before you, and resist the impulse to cling to old ways, and wish change hadn’t happened.

The trick is to choose to walk in unfamiliar territory, to be led by faith and not by habit, and to not despair at what isn’t the same. It is to allow Donna and Barbara and new leaders and maybe even unexpected leaders to be instruments God will use to guide you to the new reality God has in mind. After flipping over the tables, Jesus talked about the resurrecting power of God, and where there is a vacuum of the familiar, like there will be tomorrow, God rushes in with grace that brings new life.

I preached my candidating sermon here the June before September 11th, and I titled it, “Fresh Face, Familiar Faith”—the point being that though I was a stranger, there was a faith we shared that pastor and people would find familiar in the other. And today, at the end of my ministry among you, I called the sermon “Familiar Face, Fresh Faith,” because, in the end, keeping our faith fresh is what’s it all about, no matter where we go. When we become too comfortable, when patterns and people that once seemed novel are now so predictable that we barely notice, faith can begin to whither. God’s grace thrives on the change that human life can’t help but go through. Stepping into the unknown confidently, trusting the rainbow and the fiery pillar to be there to guide, having faith that God can resurrect and make all things new—that intention will guarantee that God will do amazing things in you and through you. This is your season and mine to make our faith fresh once more. May it be so, and may it be soon.