I would like to begin our time together with a prayer
written by Walter Brueggemann, from his collection, Prayers for a Privileged
People.
Let us pray:
Here we are, practitioners of memos:
We send e-mail and we receive it,
We copy it and forward it and save it and delete it.
We write to move the data, and
organize the
program,
and keep
people informed –
and know how to control and manage.
We write and receive one-dimensional memos,
that are, at
best, clear and unambiguous.
And then – in breathtaking ways – you summon us to
song.
You, by your very presence, call us to lyrical voice;
You, by your book, give us cadences of praise
that we sing
and say, "allelu, allelu."
You, by your hymnal, give us many voices
toward thanks
and gratitude and amazement.
You, by your betraying absence,
call us to
lament and protest and complaint.
All our songs are toward you
in praise, in
thanks and in need.
We sing figure and image and parallel and metaphor.
We sing thickness according to our coded community.
We sing and draw close to each other, and to you.
We sing. Things become fresh. But then the moment breaks
and we sink back into memos:
"How many pages?"
"When it is due?"
"Do you need footnotes?"
We are hopelessly memo kinds of people.
So we pray, by the power of your spirit,
give us some
song-infused days,
deliver us
from memo-dominated nights.
Give us a different rhythm,
of
dismay and promise,
of candor and
hope,
of trusting
and obeying.
Give us courage to withstand
the world of memo
and to draw near to your craft of life
given in the wind.
We pray back to you the Word made flesh;
We pray, "Come soon."
We say, "Amen."
I.
Introduction: Roots and
Wings
If an expert is someone who comes from at least fifty
miles away, I want to be very clear: I’m not here as an expert. I am a friend
and colleague in ministry, a part of the Jesus-movement in this Commonwealth.
I’m here as a fellow traveler who is honored to have been invited to be with
you today, just three days before I take a three-month sabbatical.
I am blessed to know some of you very well and over
many years. But since I am not known to most of you, I want to begin with a few
words about me. My intent is not to inflict my psychobiography on you. Rather,
it is that you know a bit more about where I am coming from which I think in
the practice of pastoral ministry is always a good thing, but also because I think
that all theological reflection is (for better and for worse) autobiographical.
Frederick Beuchner put it this way in The Sacred Journey:
My assumption is that the story of any one of us
is in some measure the story of us all. For the reader, I suppose, it is like
looking through someone else's photograph album. What holds you, if nothing
else, is the possibility that somewhere among all those shots of people you
never knew and places you never saw, you may come across something or someone
you recognize.
I have one of those little framed prints in my office in Springfield that
was given to me back in the early 1990s by the director of the Christ and Holy
Trinity Pre-School in Westport, CT where my oldest son, Graham, was a student
at the time and where I was the Associate Rector. Today it would be a meme and
perhaps is. It simply says this: “There are two things you can give your
children: roots and wings.”
So, a long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I was a
child, given both roots and wings. My roots are in Hawley, Pennsylvania.
I’m the oldest of four and grew up in a small town of about 1800 with one
blinking traffic light, northeast of Scranton, just a few miles from Lake
Wallenpaupack. I grew up with both sets of grandparents and two sets of great-grandparents
within walking distance from my home. I was baptized at St. Paul’s Lutheran
Church but raised up and confirmed at the Hawley United Methodist Church. The
pastor for all my growing up years was the Rev. Gail Wintermute and my Sunday
School teacher for many of those same years was Mrs. Katharine Bates. To use
language borrowed from Donald Winnicot, it was a “good enough” congregation and
they were both “good enough” guides to the Christian faith. I learned to love
God and my neighbor there.
As for wings, I began trying them out at Georgetown
University in Washington, DC in the Fall 1981. I am the first in my family to
go to college. My closest friends at Georgetown were almost all New York City
Jesuit high school guys who spoke the insider language of Fordham Prep and
Regis that I didn’t know at all. They had studied Latin in high school! They helped
me to navigate my way at Georgetown. Even though as New Yorkers they quickly labelled
Washington as a AAA city, it sure felt big enough to me. And not for nothing,
Patrick Ewing arrived on campus that same fall, so we had some pretty exciting
basketball and a lot of March Madness ahead of us over the course of the next
four years.
My father died, suddenly and unprepared, on April 30,
1982; it will be forty years ago on Saturday. It happened just a week or so
before the end of my freshman year and I was in a course required by the
Jesuits at the time called “Problem of God.” No kidding.
Yet the crisis of faith that followed and led me to ask
big existential questions also bore the fruit of a more mature faith on the
other side of it – if I’m even yet on the other side of it. And vocationally,
it led almost directly to a decision to rethink law school as my life work and
apply to seminaries right after graduation. I’ll spare you the details today,
except to say that I am one of those people who went to seminary more clear
that that was my next step than that I’d be ordained at the end of three
years.
I told the United Methodist Board of Ministry that I
felt called to be “a Protestant Jesuit.” That language made sense to me and
enough sense to them to let me slip through.
At first, that took me to an ecumenical campus
ministry in New Britain, Connecticut. One way of living into a call to be a
“Protestant Jesuit” is to serve God on a college campus. I think our first
ordained jobs mark us, for both good and ill, and mine certainly did. The
ministry was funded by six Protestant judicatories. I also developed close
working relationships with the Newman House Catholic priest (his name was
Father Lord) and a reconstructionist rabbi. I assumed all ministry was
ecumenical and interfaith and that we needed partners to do the work. I still
do.
Five years after being ordained, however, I found myself
coming to a different understanding of “Protestant Jesuit.” I’d been flirting
with the Episcopal Church even as an undergrad at Georgetown. In my third year
of seminary I worked for the new rector at Grace Episcopal Church in Madison,
Bob Ihloff. Two of my most influential professors (Nelson Thayer and Charles
Rice) were already serving there as priest associates. And after my first year
of seminary, I had married a “cradle” Episcopalian, who by the way grew up at
St. Anne’s-in- the-Fields in Lincoln, where we also were married. All of that
“centrifugal force” converged in June 1993 when I was re-ordained to the
diaconate at Christ Church Cathedral in Hartford and then to the priesthood at
Christ and Holy Trinity, Westport in February 1994.
I’m going to hit pause here. If we are going to talk and think about vocation today it can be helpful to return to where it all began, to the times and places where we began to notice the calling of voices in our lives. I hope in hearing a little of my story it’s made some connections to yours and maybe primed the pump. I now want to invite you to find a friendly face and just turn to them for some conversation – 2-3 minutes each. Roots and Wings. Share something that may not be known by the person you are speaking with about what you were in touch with at the beginning of awakening to your call, even if it took years to act on it. Give each other the gift of listening in.
II. Early priestly formation
When it all finally happened and I was in fact
ordained in the Episcopal Church, I still felt called to campus ministry. St.
Mark’s in Storrs, literally on the UConn campus, was open at the time. But I
ended up as the runner-up to a guy named Rob Hirshfeld. For those who don’t
know, Rob served there until he was called to Grace, Amherst when I was still
rector at St. Francis, Holden. So we’ve been colleagues for many years. It was
from Grace that Rob was elected Bishop of New Hampshire. Next week he will be
the speaker at our WMA Clergy Conference at the Barbara C. Harris Center. (But
of course I’ll miss that; did I mention that I’ll be on sabbatical?)
After the bitter disappointment of not being called to
serve at St. Mark’s, I landed at Christ and Holy Trinity Church in Westport as
their Associate Rector. I’m grateful that I did and in hindsight I realize that
this was the Lord’s provision, my own ram in the thicket. It was better for me in
both the short-run and in the long-run than being on my own in Storrs as a
newby in a new denomination. No associate position is perfect. But my four and
a half years in that parish did way more for me than any Anglican year at any
Episcopal seminary could have. I also learned a bit about leading from the
second chair over my time there, which has served me well in these past nine. But
mostly I was loved into the Episcopal Church in Westport, and to this day I
remain grateful to them for it.
I realize in looking back that I came into the
Episcopal Church at the end of an era, and you could feel it in several ways even
at the time. I did multiple courses at the College of Preachers at National
Cathedral which ultimately ran out of money. It was there I got to spend time
with people like Barbara Brown Taylor and Phyllis Trible. Walter Brueggeman
once told me that Phyllis Trible was James Muilenburg’s best student and that
she was the well-deserved heir of being called his best rhetorical scholar.
They were both students of Muilenburg, so that was high praise.
But Phyllis Trible didn’t draw a crowd. She did Texts
of Terror with us which may also have scared some people. So there were
like ten of us just sitting around the table with her for a whole glorious week
at the College of Preachers. I sat next to Verna Dozier, who was there as a fellow
student and fan of Trible. I will never forget that week!
When I offered up what I thought was my best sermon
ever, that I’d preached at a commissioning of lay ministers service, Ms. Dozier
politely wondered with me what it would be like to commission lay people for
their work in the world and not just as “daddy’s helpers” in church. She
was right, of course and I never forgot it. That seed ended up becoming a big
part of my DMin work, which I will tell you about soon.
I also got to go through the Clergy Leadership Project
and work with Hugh O’Dougherty from the Kennedy School. Hugh is a colleague of Ron
Heifitz so I learned about leadership without easy answers second-hand, although
that is probably not fair to Hugh. Both the COP and CLP left a mark. But I also
felt like I was doing these things at the end, after all the “cool” older
boomers had done them already. (Is “cool older boomers” an oxymoron?)
The issue of adaptive versus technical work (with a
lot of Rabbi Ed Friedman thrown in there) is what energizes me in both parish
and diocesan work. When it came time for me to do a DMin I settled on Columbia
Theological Seminary, where I got to study “missional church” before it was considered
cool in a program called “Gospel and Culture.” There I got to sit at the feet
of Walter Brueggemann, Barbara Brown Taylor, and the somewhat lesser known (but
also very talented) Anna Carter Florence. All three of them left their marks on
me.
I need also to mention the Fellowship of St. John the
Evangelist which unlike those other two seems to be going stronger than ever
and is so important to my journey. When I was in Connecticut, I would take
retreats at Holy Cross Monastery. But starting in 1998, when I was called to
St. Francis, Holden, I discovered the monastery in Cambridge and Emery House.
For the past twenty-five years, as part of the Fellowship, that’s been one of
the key constants in my formation and I honestly don’t think I’d have made it
without those brothers, for whom I pray every day.
So again, there is no test at the end on my story. What I hope is that perhaps you’ve overheard some of your own story, whether you have been ordained longer than I have or for a minute and a half. What I want to do again is take a few moments to ask you to think about how you have learned to be a priest or deacon after the formal education part. Take a few moments first in silence and then share a bit with each other: how have you been formed in this work by the places you have served and by mentors? Who are the saints in your own “cloud of witnesses” who have formed you beyond ordination?
III.
What Comes Next? Song-Infused
Days
Thank you to Bishop Alan and Bishop Gayle and my
brother from another mother, your Canon to the Ordinary, Bill. And to those
I’ve shared transition work with over these past nine years in particular:
Bishop Carol and Martha and Kelly and before them, the one and only Jean-Baptiste.
All are treasured colleagues. Last year I got to know Julie Carson and Pam
Wentz in the work we did on common ministry between our two dioceses. Along
with the two lay women and Bill, they represented you all very well and there
was a lot of “holy envy” going on over the 495 Border. I also am grateful to see Martha Gardner, who amazes me and whom I think is perhaps our very own "Verna Dozier" here in the Commonwealth.
I also need to give a shout out to Phil Labelle, who
was on my staff as youth minister at St. Francis, Holden when I arrived in
February 1998 and who we ended up sponsoring for ordination. Proudly. As some
of you know, Phil now serves in the only DioMass parish in Worcester County. I was
the preacher at Phil’s ordination to the priesthood. Like mine it took place in
Fairfield County, CT. On that snowy day, Phil and Melissa also had decided that
this would be the day that their eldest, Noah, would be baptized. I told Phil
and Melissa and those in the assembly that day that I thought this was an
outward and visible sign we must not miss: that as great as this day was for Phil,
to be clear this was a bigger day for Noah. And that Phil’s own baptism (and
mine, and yours) were more important than our ordinations. And that his calling
as dad was more important than his vocation as a priest.
Verna Dozier had gotten to me.
And I still think she (of blessed memory) has written perhaps the most
important book for us in these days that lie ahead. Whatever a post-pandemic
church is going to look like: it’s about The Dream of God and God’s
dream is about the ministry of all the baptized. If you have never read The
Dream of God: A Call to Return, I encourage you to do so soon and if you
have read it, pull it off your bookshelf and read it again, in this new time
and place. It’s still so important to the work God has given us to do.
The theology of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer
gets it just right, I think. The catechism asks: who are the ministers of the
Church? And the correct answer is that the ministers of the Church are lay
persons, bishops, priests, and deacons. But we are a very long way from living
into that dream. We profess it with our lips, but in so many ways we remain a
long distance from living it in our lives. In most places we still mostly just commission
lay ministers to be on vestry or altar guild or teach Sunday School, rather
than to go out to do the work God has given them to do in the world. In fact if
they get too busy in their work and say they don’t have time for vestry we can
get a little annoyed with them.
When I did my DMin, I needed to do a project and the
seed that Verna Dozier had planted those years before did grow and did bear
fruit. I developed curriculum for four groups of professionals in my
congregation to think about their faith in the workplace and to ask the very
simple but important question: how was what we were doing on Sunday morning
empowering them to do what they were sent out to do on Monday? I had a bunch of
lawyers and educators and health-care workers and businesspeople at St. Francis,
so those were my four small groups, with 5-6 persons in each group. The six weeks
that we did that work were not at church. We met in their workplaces and we
focused on what it was like for them to live as followers of Jesus in the
office, in the classroom, in the hospital and in the courts.
I will say that it was pretty cool and I like to think
they got something out of it. But to tell the truth it changed me way more than
I think it changed them. It changed how I thought about my own ministry. It
changed my preaching. It changed how I thought about their lives and the
challenges they faced. It changed how I prayed for them.
I was in Washington DC
visiting my oldest son, Graham, and his wife Cara, when Christen asked me for a
title for this talk. The first part of it was a tip of the hat to Hamilton for
those who missed it: what comes next? You all got that?
I struggled for what might come after the first part of that clever title,
though. We aren’t post-pandemic yet. We are still learning and I’m not yet sure
we’ve learned. We are still waiting. I settled on “Mission and Ministry Going
Forward,” which is still what I want to talk with you about, but I didn’t really
like that second part of the title very much.
I therefore want to revise
that in a way that would not have made any sense before I prayed today’s
opening prayer, which I’d not yet thought of using when I came up with that
title. This is the pertinent part:
We are hopelessly memo
kinds of people.
So we
pray, by the power of your spirit,
give us some
song-infused days,
deliver us
from memo-dominated nights.
What comes next? Song-Infused
Days. That’s my working answer to the question: what comes next? We need to
get clear on our mission and ministry for sure. But I think that the way we
will do that is to learn to sing again, not by issuing memos. That will include
songs of thanks, gratitude, amazement for sure. But also songs of lament,
protest, complaint. All the songs we sing toward the living God in praise, and
thanks, and need.
My COVID experience has been relatively privileged,
like much of my life. My wife, Hathy, works for the New England Regional AIDS
Education and Training Center and she has worked from home since UMass Medical
School told them to go home over two years ago. While we don’t live in a giant
house, it’s big enough that we have carved out work space and personal space
for the two of us as empty-nesters. Our adult children, Graham and James, and
their partners have been similarly fortunate in Washington, DC and Hoboken, NJ.
I discovered a while ago that doing diocesan work is
very different than parochial work. Honestly, the first few years I was doing
this work I grieved the loss of parish ministry which as I said, I never
thought I’d even be doing when I went off to seminary. But I also must add that
I don’t envy you who have been doing it for the past two years. The truth is
that while my work involves a lot of people, it’s often meeting with search
committees or vestries. It’s no longer about holding a child in my arms and marking
them as Christ’s own forever, or anointing the dying, or even breaking the
bread. It turns out you can meet with a vestry in Stockbridge from Worcester on
Zoom at 6 pm and pour a glass of wine and start dinner at 7:15 if you keep them
moving and that’s actually nicer than driving back on the Mass Pike in the
dark.
I’m not saying there wasn’t loss during the worst days
of the pandemic; that would gloss over the truth. What I am saying is that much
of my own job was more easily adaptable to the new realities we faced than the
work of parish clergy or even the work of bishops who also use their hands to
ordain and consecrate and bless and confirm. Early on I realized that without a
daily commute I was free to begin each day by walking; in 2021 I averaged over
six miles a day.
Some months into the pandemic, I began to wonder as I
wandered: what if all that Once and Future Church stuff about the end of
Christendom that Loren Mead and Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon had been
talking about throughout my whole ordained life was really, finally, happening and
the Church was actually being deconstructed before our very eyes? What if the
pandemic didn’t do something new but just accelerated what was already unfolding?
And most importantly, what if amid all the temptations
toward memos, we were now being called up on to learn to sing the Lord’s song
again in a strange land? What might song-infused days look like?
Poetry in general and the psalms in
particular got me through the worst days of the pandemic. At
our Winter Clergy Day I worked with my friend and colleague, Canon Vicki Ix, and
we presented the Psalms as the content part of our time together. I naturally
went to Walter Bruggemann’s Message of the Psalms where he divides the
Psalter into three categories: Psalms of Orientation, Disorientation, New
Orientation. (I’d actually had a chance to learn that book in the classroom
with him, in a class he called “Earthy Spirituality.”) Vicki had been a Roman
Catholic nun in her previous life so she talked about the psalms shaping devotional
prayer.
If you’ve gotten out of the habit of praying the
psalms for whatever reason (and I don’t mean the happy ones on Sunday morning
which are usually truncated and even when we do the harder ones we usually tidy
them up with Anglican chant!) I mean the ones we get to pray daily (including
the challenging disorienting ones.) I invite you to find your way back to those
again if you haven’t already and then help your people discover them again too.
As you all know, the psalms are poems and for us in
the Church many of our poems are sung as hymns. I was an English major, so
poetry comes very naturally to me and it stirs my soul. I know it’s not that
way for everyone. My second son, James, is a structural engineer. He actually
knows how buildings stand up and how they sometimes fall down! We always knew
James was headed toward that kind of work and never more so than the day he
came home from school and threw up his arms and said to me in an exasperated
voice: I don’t understand why poets don’t just say what they mean!
So I get it: we are one, but we’re not the same. As
for me though, I returned to a lot of poetry over the past two years, almost
daily. Two of my go-tos have consistently been Mary Oliver and David Whyte. I
want to share two poems with you today, one from each, that have been very
important to my spiritual life over the past two years. First, Mary Oliver – To
Begin With, The Sweet Grass – it’s a long one:
Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat
of the sweet grass?
Will the owl bite off its own wings?
Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air
or
forget to sing?
Will the rivers run upstream?
Behold, I say—behold
the reliability and the finery and the teachings
of this gritty earth gift.
Eat bread and understand comfort.
Drink water, and understand delight.
Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets
are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds
who are drinking the sweetness, who are
thrillingly gluttonous.
For one thing leads to another.
Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you
believe in.
And someone’s face, whom you love, will be as a
star
both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and
respectful.
And you will hear the air itself, like a
beloved, whisper:
oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two
beautiful bodies of your lungs.
The witchery of living
is my whole conversation
with you, my darlings.
All I can tell you is what I know.
Look, and look again.
This world is not just a little thrill for the
eyes.
It’s more than bones.
It’s more than the delicate wrist with its
personal pulse.
It’s more than the beating of the single heart.
It’s praising.
It’s giving until the giving feels like
receiving.
You have a life—just imagine that!
You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe
still another.
Someday I am going to ask my friend Paulus,
the dancer, the potter,
to make me a begging bowl
which I believe
my soul needs.
And if I come to you,
to the door of your comfortable house
with unwashed clothes and unclean fingernails,
will you put something into it?
I would like to take this chance.
I would like to give you this chance.
We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or
we
change.
Congratulations, if you have changed.
Let me ask you this.
Do you also think that beauty exists for some
fabulous reason?
And, if you have not been enchanted by this
adventure—
your life—
what would do for you?
What I loved in the beginning, I think, was
mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my confinements,
though with difficulty.
I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is
nourishment
somehow or another).
And I have become the child of the clouds, and
of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever
that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have
learned,
I have become younger.
And what do I risk to tell you this, which is
all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love
the world.
The second is a much shorter poem from David Whyte. It’s
called “Loaves and Fishes.”
This is not
the age of information.
This is not
the age of information.
Forget the news,
and the radio,
and the blurred screen.
This is the time of loaves
and fishes.
People are hungry,
and one good word is bread
for a thousand.
So this is the last time I’ll break you up
into diads, with copies of those two poems coming around. What is speaking to
your heart in this time and place, right now, in these early days of Eastertide
2022? What are the new songs you have been learning or that you hope to learn?
Can you begin to articulate what “song-infused days” might look like for you?
What comes next? I hope and pray that it is song-infused days.
That metaphor is has it's roots in a big powerful Biblical experience as you all know: the
Babylonian Exile, when God’s people truly wondered (with their place of worship
in ruins) could they/would they ever sing the Lord’s song again? How could
they? Their harps were hung on the weeping willows of Babylon.
But they did. Sure,
they sang the blues for a while, those songs of disorientation, those songs of lament
and protest and complaint. But those songs (as Bruggemann puts it, “their
candor with God”) led them to a new day and to new songs and to a new way of
being God’s people. In the end rebuilding the temple under the leadership of
Ezra and Nehemiah was the least of it. That was the technical part. The
engineers knew how to make the building stand up.
But also, by the waters of Babylon, after all the
tears, they remembered God-with-them, and they trusted:
…unto us a child will
be born, a son given and the government will rest upon his shoulders and his
name will be called: Wonderful! Counselor! The Prince of Peace!
Those words had to wait a long time for George
Frederick Handel to hear the melody from the angels and archangels. But from
the beginning they conveyed hope and the promise that God still had a few
tricks up Her sleeve.
And they collected up all those scrolls. They wrote it
all down and they eventually became people of the Book, or perhaps more
accurately, people of the library of scrolls. Because of what they did and
because they knew God wasn’t yet done with them, we get to read, mark and learn
and inwardly digest those scrolls. Remember that no one had been running around
at creation with a clip board to write Genesis! The priests and scribes
reflected when their kids came home from school talking about those Babylonian
creation stories and so they carefully worked on not one, but two, creation
stories, influenced by Babylon but different: both pointing toward the God of
Israel. They carefully constructed and reconstructed their own stories with God
at the center.
In the beginning,
they said, God created the heavens and the earth. And God saw that it was good…And
after six days of work, God rested.
That’s not science! It’s poetry. It’s liturgical
language! And it grew out of the exile, out of the destruction of the Temple,
out of something awful. It turns out God could still be God. What came next
after all that heartache and trauma? Song-infused days! It turns out that God could
still make a highway in the desert and most importantly, still be faithful. So
they sang new songs. Isaiah: Comfort ye, O Comfort ye, my people. Ezekiel:
Dem bones dem bones, dem dry bones!
There have been technical learnings for sure in this
pandemic that may help us going forward. Most of us now know how to Zoom,
although I wish I could do a Vulcan mind meld with those who still seem
flummoxed by how the mute button works in both directions. Unmute when you want
to talk. Mute when the dog is barking. This is not complicated! And we trusted
the science - imagine that in 21st Century America? We trusted the
science to guide us in when and how we might assemble with relative safety. I
am so grateful to have worked early on in the pandemic with you all on offering
guidelines and if you don’t know it already, Bill Parnell worked like crazy on
that. I was just along for the ride.
But how and what shall we sing, going forward? People
are hungry, and one good word is bread for a thousand! Enough with the memos!
We need song-infused days!
I am hopeful because I think that crisis potentially
pushes us back to purpose, to our “why?” And even if those “young families
don’t come back again” I think that the harvest really is very plentiful right
now. Unfortunately the laborers are few, especially the ordained ones.
Did I mention that I think Verna Dozier was a prophet
ahead of her time? The future church will not be all about the clergy! I love
you, bishops and deacons and priests of this diocese and my own. But it’s not
all about us! Our work is to rally the troops! Our work is the empower and
equip the laity. It always has been.
This pushes us back to the heart of the matter: to the
calling of voices, to our vocations. And also to the bonds of affection we
share with Lutherans and with Luther: everybody is called to seek and
serve Christ. Lawyers and teachers and nurses and businesspeople are all called
to share this work with us, in their daily lives. They too, are called. Our job
is to help remind them of that. Our job is to make Sunday morning powerful
enough to carry them through Monday to Friday so that they respect the dignity
of every human being and make choices that further God’s mission of mercy,
compassion, and hope not just at vestry meetings but at the state house and in
board rooms.
Some clergy said to me over the past two years: “I
didn’t sign up for this!” The pastor in me received that information and tried
to offer a word of consolation: ditto. Me too. I get it. It’s been hard. It’s
been really hard. I’m so sorry. And I meant all that! Every word of it.
…AND, the theologian in me wanted to offer them an alternative narrative, or at
least another frame. And in relationships with a high level of trust, I have.
I’ll take that risk today with you because even if it’s only thirty miles I’ll
head home soon after this so whoever I insult, I’m sorry, but complain to the
planning committee!
Yes, you did sign on for this! Yes,
we all did. It’s in our vows! We are the heirs of the Church of Julian of
Norwich who lived through the plague and still said, “all shall be well.” Those
words weren’t a Hallmark card without a context; they were born from her own
time of pandemic life.
We are part of the cloud of witnesses that includes
those martyrs of Memphis, Tennessee. Remember? When yellow fever went through
Memphis in the latter part of the nineteenth century, those four nuns and two
priests cared for people at St. Mary’s Cathedral and it cost them their lives.
We are part of the Church of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who
knew the cost of discipleship even when it meant standing up to Adolf Hitler
and calling him out for what he was. We are part of the Church of Dr. King,
whose dream was a direct response to Jim Crow and Bull Connor’s firehoses.
We signed on to be living members of the
Body of Christ at Holy Baptism and in that Sacrament we
have been claimed and marked and sealed. Forever. And in return, we have
promised to follow Jesus in the way of love, which also goes by the name of the
way of the cross. And we doubled-down when we knelt before a bishop to become
deacons and priests. This is most definitely what we signed up for. And yes, it
is hard.
Or did we sign on to be sacristy rats?
I preached at our Renewal of Vows Service a couple of
weeks ago. It was my 25th in the Diocese of Western Mass. I preached
on Elijah the Tishbite. I’ll spare you the whole sermon and just give you the
takeaway: before Elijah hears that still small voice (or if you prefer, “the
sound of sheer silence”) the angel of the Lord says: Eat something. Drink
something. Get some rest. You need your strength for the journey ahead.
I went on longer than that, but that was basically it.
We need our strength for the journey ahead too. So do what it takes and
remember you are not some disembodied gnostic soul: eat something, hydrate, and
take a nap. We need to be healthy (or get healthy) because the work ahead will
be difficult. What Comes Next? By God’s grace and with God’s help, song-infused
days. Let us pray:
We are hopelessly memo kinds
of people.
So we pray, by the power of your spirit,
give us some
song-infused days,
deliver us
from memo-dominated nights.
Give us a different
rhythm,
of dismay and promise,
of candor and
hope,
of trusting
and obeying.
Give us courage to withstand the world of memo
and to draw near to your craft of life
given in the wind.
We pray back to you the Word made flesh;
We pray, "Come soon."
We say, "Amen."
