Wednesday, April 27, 2022

What Comes Next? Song-Infused Days!

Today I was a guest of the Diocese of Massachusetts - the "other" Diocese in the Commonwealth, at their Spring Clergy Conference. Here is what I shared.

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

For the past nine years I have served on Bishop Doug Fisher’s staff in the diocese just to your west. Although our diocesan offices are in Springfield, I live in Worcester. So I’ve traveled just about thirty miles to get here.

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

My MDiv had been earned at Drew Theological School, a United Methodist seminary. Immediately after Drew, I did a ThM at Princeton Seminary in Church History. I focused on the Reformation and wrote my thesis on the first Prayerbook. Bishop Arthur Walmlsey did not require me to go back to seminary for an Anglican year, but instead assigned me to a mentor to teach me some Anglican polity. As far as I was concerned, I didn’t need to leave the Wesley brothers behind to become an Episcopalian. I still feel that way and remember them both every March 3 with deep appreciation.

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

So I jumped right into this talk, but I want to back up a little now that I’ve introduced myself. I want to say that I am very grateful for the invitation to be here with you today to begin this conversation. Thanks to the planning committee and especially to Christen for inviting me and helping me think through this time with you. Did I mention that I’m going on sabbatical in three days? So my initial inclination was to say “thanks, but no thanks.” The run-up to sabbatical is always a little crazy. But I’m glad I said yes. Whatever you make of this time for yourself today, it has actually been really helpful to me to sit and think a bit about it as I do indeed prepare to step away for a season.

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?


IV.            Concluding Thoughts

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."
  

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