Grace to you and peace from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Last Sunday, we spoke about drowning, taking our cue from the Word of God about the baptism of our Lord. Today, I'd like to help us understand more about taking that plunge into the waters of ministry at St. Thomas. Next Sunday, we'll talk more about the purpose of our drowning.

This morning we hear the good confession of St. Peter. He replies to Jesus when he asks who the disciples think that he is: "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God."

The faith that Jesus is the Messiah-the Christ-and the Son of God, is the foundation of the Church. It is the fundamental truth of Christianity and the confession of faith in which we all stand.

Today is for confession-the kind of confession that speaks of faith that transforms, that cleanses the soul, that rips out from our hearts whatever keeps us from embracing the grace of God and the love of our Lord. The confession that we make each Sunday is an opportunity for cleansing from whatever it is that divides us from God.

St. Thomas has been through a very difficult period in its life-a time that has involved division, anger, confusion, and a deep pain. And as much as many folks would like to think it's over, it is already clear to me from conversations I've had that there are still some matters that will benefit from confession.

Let me give you some of my initial impressions about what might need to be said. For those of you here this morning who were not a part of the conflict resolution process, I suspect that you will easily apply these thoughts to some conflict in your own life.

My first home visit, on my first day here, was with Marcella Calvert, one of the few remaining charter members of St. Thomas. I'll bet most of you know her, and that every one of you who know her also love her. What a fine, dedicated, human, delightful, Christian woman!

Our rather long visit included a lot of confession. She has consented to let me share with you some of what surfaced in our time together (I want you to know this, because I want you to know that confidentiality is sacred, and what you share with me in confidence stays with me unless you give me permission otherwise.).

Marcella expressed many things that I believe we all need to express together in order to release the joyous new life that lies bound up in the drowning death that this congregation has known over the last several years.

First, pain. Marcella described coming to worship and just crying. She wasn't sure where the tears came from, but there was an overwhelming pain in her heart, an aching for her church and the struggle of the people she loves. It was spontaneous. It came from the heart of one whose age and experience had shed the self-protections of pride and position. She simply sat in worship and felt. And as she felt, she showed her feelings. She wept for St. Thomas.

I love her all the more as I think of that. What honesty! She wasn't looking for consolation. She didn't want to upset others. It wasn't a show of weakness or need.

Paul says, "My strength is made perfect in weakness." (2 Cor. 12:9)

It was a spontaneous expression of prayer. What was in her heart before the Lord, came out of her as she offered herself in worship and praise. Her tears were an act of worship from which we can all learn. Her soul was bared to her God, without rancor, without malice, without restraint.

Oh, how we restrain ourselves! How we hold ourselves back, how we hold ourselves in! How we destroy ourselves bit by bit when we think we're being righteous or proper or considerate!

It is only self-deception. Spiritual refuse. Some things simply pollute us; they constipate us spiritually, if we don't let them go.

I will spare you taking this metaphor any further because you already get the idea. And that is how poignant is the lesson that Marcella has to teach us. Church is not a place to get all pent up with things. It is a place to let them go. It is a place where we may be cleansed of whatever it is that may be soiling our souls.

May God grant us the courage to let it out. May God grant to us here and those who have taken their troubled souls out of our fellowship that same courage, because leaving is no cure. The holding in is still as soul-disturbing.

We need to feel and speak frankly, yet lovingly, with God and with one another.

Second, Marcella expressed disappointment. Some haven't had the ability to weather this storm. Some have left. Some have simply had too many personal struggles to give room to the communal turmoil that came upon this corner of God's vineyard. But I suspect that disappointment still lurks in the hearts of many who remain in this fellowship.

The disappointment involves, in part, the matter of secrecy. Your leaders, as Marcella experienced it, made a decision that disappointed her. They decided not to share fully the details of what happened. This too was painful. She felt that she and many others who weren't trusted with the full story were perhaps not honored as they might have been. She felt that she could have taken in whatever it might have been without undue upset or over-reaction. Indeed, she said that there is absolutely nothing that could make her sever her relationship with this congregation.

Now, I do not in any way whatsoever intend to impugn the motives of the leadership. There are many matters, especially those dealing with personnel, that for legal and ethical reasons must be kept confidential. Some such decisions are made to protect all involved. It is my assumption that this was the case.

That does not, however, mean that these difficult leadership decisions don't have consequences. There is hurt. There is disappointment. There is considerable opportunity for conjecture regarding facts and motives and trust. It is probably unavoidable.

Still, our confession-our verbalization, our getting it all out in the open for God and our sisters and brothers in Christ to hear-is important to the full baptismal drowning and death that God intends for us.

Third, joy. Faith, Marcella said, should be a joyful thing. Amen. And Amen.

God is good; all the time.

All the time; God is good. [Go through the rehearsal, grounded in African-American worship, which doesn't shy away from feeling, and now being adapted even by our bishop at synod assemblies.]

Faith is a joyful thing!

My rather feeble expression at the stewardship committee of a revised mission statement for St. Thomas still troubles me, and I apologize for any feelings I may have frayed. I know how much work it takes to craft a mission statement, and I should have approached my concern with greater sensitivity.

I only wanted to inject into our touchstone as a congregation some of the joy that Marcella knows faith contains. My modest and clearly inadequate suggestion was to shift it from "We are a Christ-centered community that lives, shares and celebrates God's grace with all people!" to "We are a Christ-centered community experiencing the joy of common table fellowship". And even that doesn't get at the service, justice, and advocacy components of a church that is fully alive in Christ. I wanted merely to embrace the budding joy that I see here, and that I trust will come to full flower in the years to come.

Marcella gave a wonderful witness to the kind of thing I had in mind. As she sat here during those hard days weeping in worship, I believe that Marcella was expressing the joy in her heart. Some of you know what I mean.

Joy, when it yearns for fullness and knows the pain of the body, sometimes comes out of us as tears. Joy is not happiness. It is much deeper than that. It dwells in the heart and the soul and the imagination as an image of what we have known in some ways and of what yet might be. It is rooted in the past and in the future that we trust is ours in Christ. It springs from our baptismal drowning. It lives in the words of scripture. It yearns in our vision of the joys of common table fellowship that shapes our hope for the Church and for the world and for eternity.

I didn't even go through what you all did, but I feel deeply for you and with you. We need to let ourselves feel. We need to let it out. We need to confess the pain and the disappointment, and perhaps the anger and resentment that is in us. If this is a need, let me know. I expect I will continue to hear it as I make my visits among you. But I also suspect that we need places for us to hear one another.

I believe that such confessions are the whimpers of joy crying out for release from the prison of a bound heart. It's what the Old Testament often calls "hardness of heart"-unexpressed pain over the failure of the temporal to give expression to what is real and spiritual, or unwillingness to open the heart to what is real.

Note well my language here. The temporal-what we experience in the daily grind of hard feelings-is not reality. The "real" transcends profoundly what we experience. The "real" as I am using it here is where our spirits live. The real is that vision of St. Thomas that got cried out from Marcella and that is now coming to be and will come to be for her and for us, partially in time, fully in eternity.

So, confess. Express to me or to a friend or to your friend Jesus those things that hold you back. For each confession will bring release. Each shared burden is lessened. And pain and disappointment are transformed into new energy and fuller joy. It is a part of the drowning in the waters of baptism that we talked about last Sunday and part of the glorious future that God holds for us that we will discuss next week.

Confess. Not only the pains and struggles but also the faith. Make confession not only a turning inward upon the walls and blockades, but also a turning outward towards Jesus and the community that is Jesus in the world-St. Thomas and Bloomington, the whole Church and all of the planet. Remember as the bad air comes out that the good air replaces it-of Christ who is lived, shared and celebrated among us and with all people, in joy.

Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of the living God who lives in us! Amen.

May the peace which passes all understanding keep our hearts and minds through faith in Christ Jesus our Lord, unto eternal life. Amen.