Rev. McKinley L. Sims, M.Div.

The Sacred Wheel turns on and we enter both a new season and the falling time of this holy year. The Summer fades away and Autumn rushes on with new beginnings: a new school year, a new church year, a new football season, and a new minister. How good it is to start these things together as a community! I am incredibly excited for the newness of this season in Restoration’s history, and I am also aware that it is also not a new season. In many ways, it is an old season. This church has celebrated 80 years in this building, and looks forward to the 200th Anniversary of the charter in 2020. We are both new and old, all at once….and I don’t say this to add more weight to me being one of the youngest persons in attendance on Sunday mornings! That mix of history and future potential is the lifeblood of any church, and our beloved community is no exception, although from my limited time here, there are some very exceptional happenings going on in this building!

New beginnings, but also saying goodbye to old friends. I’m thinking especially of Bill D, whose life will be celebrated on the Saturday before our Ingathering Service and the official start of the new church year. This new year will be my first with you all, but it will be all of ours without Bill D’s presence in our midst. May he and the others who have gone before us lead us onward with their spirits as we continue our mission to welcome others, practice responsibility and commitment in our community, speak out for justice, and share beauty that can transform ourselves and our world. That mission rings anew this year as well, with more opportunities to serve, grow, and change the universe around us.

Over the summer, I had the opportunity of a lifetime to travel to Wales and England with my family. You’ll hear about it more this year, I can promise you, but one of the highlights of the trip was a small moment in the Tate Modern art museum in London. I’m not usually a fan of Modern Art, because I find it to be too abstract or too…well, modern. I adore old paintings and art history, but KP wanted to go to the Tate Modern and so we did. Old and new, yes?

I was toddling through the galleries unimpressed until I came upon a piece that, at first glance, confirmed my suspicions that modern art is ridiculous and anybody can stack a pile of cardboard boxes in the corner and call it “modern” or “postmodern” or whatever. I walked past a piece called, Blank Paper by the artist Liu Jianhua. At first glance, it is three blank pieces of paper, roughly 4’x3’, in a row at eye level. I thought to myself, “Wow. Three big ol’ pieces of plain blank paper hanging on a wall. What a masterpiece!”

I had to look closer to see what I was missing. The “paper” was not paper at all, but was super thin porcelain that had been colored to mimic the texture and blankness of plain paper. My appreciation grew, but the more I stared at it, the more deep in though I became. Why is it blank? What would I put into it? Why is it here? Why porcelain? Questions and thoughts and wonderings and feelings. I was both amused and frustrated by the blankness of the piece.

Then I read the rest of the description of Blank Paper.

The “paper” was supposed to act like a mirror of your soul. You put into it whatever you brought with you, it was simply the vessel for reflection, and potentially, for transformation. It was simple and brilliant, and it transformed me. I put all my misconceptions about it onto the blank surfaces of that porcelain only to have the gentle curve of the “sheets” let those ideas slide off and drip back to me with new appreciation and a very Buddhist sense of peace in the absence of the hustle and bustle of color and shape. In the nothingness was a stillness and peace, but also an excitement for the newness of this year, of this ministry, of this community. A reminder to breathe through the stress of life and the anxiety of the future in favor of finding your center and ground of being in the porcelain surface of the blank paper waiting for the next chapter to be written.

I’m excited to help write this next chapter of Restoration’s history with this congregation in this city. The old and the new, the yesterdays and tomorrows, those who have come before us and those who are the future of this church. We are all staring at a blank page, as the artist Liu Jianhua wrote, “When facing a work like this, people may feel as if they were ‘writing’ all their feelings in the real world on it, not with pens but with their hearts.”  The work in front of us will require our feelings and our thoughts to fill the pages as we say both goodbye and hello to the past year.

But with that past to guide us and the potential of tomorrow to fuel us, may the power of today be ours to write on the pages in our community and on our world this year. Whatever we bring into this new beginning– an energized RE Program, a revamped membership and welcoming experience, a support network for activists and dreamers– these may be grown and transformed by our blank paper, and so may we. I’m looking forward to it, friends. 

Blessed be and Amen.

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/jianhua-blank-paper-t14361