You have been hearing over and over from me and from our
Vestry lately, that we at St. Thomas are going to develop our gifts and use
them to meet the needs of the community, to find an empty niche in God’s
Kingdom on Westport Road and to fill it--right? That is the dream behind the
dense language of our “development plan.” It is that kind of outward focus that
we have been told by experts and articles galore that churches need to have
these days in order to survive, in order to appeal to the younger generations.
I was not surprised, though, to have heard many of you express to me lately the
same reservations that I have had myself in our meetings with Tom Ehrich, the
consultant who has been working with our diocese:
Where is the Power of the Spirit in
all of these plans to venture beyond our doors?
Yuck, do we really have to use all of
this business language?! We are a Church and not just a social service agency. I
am a priest, not a community organizer.
What about our own spiritual needs?
How will St. Thomas meet those needs if weekend worship is no longer the measure
of our success? Without an emphasis on worship, what will keep this Body from
becoming just a pile of dried and fleshless bones?
Isn’t our job to proclaim the Good
News of Jesus Christ, not just to advise people on elder care or babysit their
children?
These are valid questions and valid concerns, for us and for
every church that is trying to find new ways to survive in the wilderness of
the 21st century religious landscape. After wrestling with today’s
lessons, though, I find that, as always, Scripture provides us with a response
to our concerns, if not always the answers that we expect.
First of all,
the easy and reassuring part: In our lesson from Nehemiah, the people of Israel
have returned from long years of Exile to the hard, practical work of rebuilding
a city, a nation, and a Temple in ruins. The Covenant with God that has defined
them as a people seems to have been lost; the Law that has brought them in
relationship to God has been scattered somewhere between Jerusalem and Babylon.
I’m sure that Israel’s leaders were full of plans and schedules and timelines
and priorities for the tremendous work that lay before them. I imagine that the
people felt pretty discouraged. In our lesson, though, we hear that when they
find their holy book of God’s Teaching in the rubble, they come together as an
entire people, men and women of all ranks, to hear God’s Word and to affirm it
together. The foundation of their “development plan” is nothing less than the
book of the Covenant that God made with them so long ago. And they begin the
implementation of their plan with grateful worship of God and with heart-felt communal
celebration, finding their strength in the “joy of the Lord.” Joyful corporate worship
is indeed our strength, too, as is our communal hearing, understanding, and
affirming of God’s Word in Scripture. Nobody is suggesting that we forget this
truth—or this joy—at St. Thomas.
When Jesus starts reading Scripture, however,
things get more complicated. Fresh from his own wilderness temptations, Luke’s Jesus
returns to his “home church” to lay out his own “development plan,” his mission
for ministry. Jesus, too, finds that plan in Scripture, yet he doesn’t just
pick up the Isaiah scroll and read it, with a nice little commentary of “OK, here’s
what you should do, people,” like I might do in a sermon. Worship and Scripture
reading, when Jesus and the Holy Spirit are involved, are not about clever
sermons that entertain, or about favorite music that soothes or energizes us. They
are not just about seeing our friends or having fun at coffee hour … or any
other of the things that we look forward to when we get in our cars to come to
church on Sunday [Saturday night.] Jesus’ mission statement is instead about
remaking the world: shattering the despair of the poor, opening the eyes of the
blind, breaking the bonds of oppression, and inaugurating the Year of Jubilee,
the time set aside by God for the forgiveness of debts, a time for everyone to
start over with fairness and grace.
Jesus’ listeners, of course, don’t
react well to his plan. How can the world change just like that? Joseph’s boy
must have lost it. They decide to throw him off of the nearest cliff. “How are
we supposed to do all that?!” we sigh with some annoyance, as well, when we
hear Jesus’ plan. The model, for us, seems to be that we hear the good news in
church—the good news that applies mainly to all of those other needy people out
there--and then we worship, and then we say, “Go in peace to love and serve the
Lord,” and then we expect ourselves
to go out and make something happen. It’s as if the closeness that we feel to God
at the Eucharist gets put on the shelf during the week, when we are supposed to
somehow rely on the resources of the secular world to get things done. And then
of course those resources prove inadequate, and we shrug, and we feel guilty,
and we wish that we could throw Jesus off the nearest cliff.
In Luke’s Gospel, however, Jesus says
that all of these earth-shattering things happen with him and in him. In him,
the blind can already see; the
oppressed are already free; the poor already have hope. Perhaps we are called
not so much to harness our gifts in order to do all of these things on our own,
but to put ourselves in a position, and in a mind-set, to see them being done,
and to open ourselves and our lives to the powerful changes that God will make
in us, as well as in the world.
I heard recently about a church in
Indianapolis, Broadway United Methodist, that is growing like wildfire. Their
members are indeed involved in their community—but not just to offer handouts
or to “help the needy.” Christians from this parish are learning to recognize blessings
in the community. The church sexton, for example, came to the pastor one day
and said that, while he was at the school bus stop in the church’s inner city
neighborhood, he noticed that many young African American dads from his
community were faithfully and lovingly walking their young children to the bus
every morning. In a time when sociologists lament the lack of involvement by
fathers in parts of the African American community, this sexton thought that these
involved fathers needed to be recognized. So the church created certificates of
appreciation, signed by the pastor, and distributed them to the dads at the bus
stop, with words of encouragement, acknowledgement, and praise. The sexton’s
attentive and loving presence allowed the Church to see Jesus at work among
their neighbors and to bless what they saw.
The other
story that I heard this week is from a prison chaplain, Chris Hoke, who works
with incarcerated gang members.[1]
Hoke has learned in his ministry how even those men bound by gang membership
and hidden behind thick prison walls are free in Jesus Christ. Hoke told me how
the prisoners in solitary confinement succeed, with great determination, in
sharing a kind of Eucharist with one another. Using Red Hot candies from the
vending machine in the prison, they flatten the hard, round balls of candy
until they are thin enough to pass under the door of the cells. Then they
harvest the elastic from their socks and underwear and fashion loops that can
pull the candy into their cell, from underneath the door. This is their
Eucharist. “What do those squashed candies taste like?” the pastor wondered
aloud to one of the men in solitary confinement. “They taste like love,”
answered the prisoner, with softness in his voice.
Hoke’s story expanded for me Paul’s
words about the Body of Christ that we hear today in I Corinthians, as well. When
I start talking with you about your gifts and passions, thanking you for
offering your gifts to the work of St. Thomas, that is all fine and dandy and
rather obvious. But Paul is not just talking to us as parishioners at St.
Thomas when he teaches us that the gifts of the weak and the less honorable and
the less able are just as valuable and indispensable to the whole body as the
strong and visible leaders. Paul is talking to us about the Body of baptized
Christians, churched and unchurched, throughout the world. Paul is urging us to
accept the gifts offered by those in other denominations whose theology annoys
us. Paul is urging us to empower the gifts in those who are so different from
us that they would never think to join us on a Sunday morning. In his prison
ministry, Hoke learned that God had given his prison friends gifts, gifts forged
in hard lives of violence and deprivation, gifts transformed in encounters with
the Holy Spirit, gifts that those of us here on Sunday morning don’t have, gifts
that the Church desperately needs, if only we can be open to them. Chaplain
Hoke sees himself, with us, as Ananias, the reluctant church insider in the
Book of Acts who is sent to bring Saul, the violent persecutor of Christians,
into the Christian community after his blinding epiphany on the Damascus Road.
Saul, of course, is to become none other than St. Paul, the author of today’s
Epistle, the saint whose conversion we celebrate today in the Church calendar. It is Paul, not Ananias, who brings Christ to the
Gentiles and who shapes the very essence of our religion; yet, if Ananias had
not been sent to pray with him, Paul might have forever remained outside the
embrace of the church, his gifts wasted.[2]
Our call, then, to open ourselves to
our community, is far from a business plan, far from a calculated move to
increase attendance numbers. It is a call led by the power of the Spirit, inspired
by Holy Scripture, nourished in worship and spiritual practice. It is a call to
enter the full Body of Christ, to expand the gifts needed to build up that Body
in our time, and to bless the miraculous transformations that only Jesus can make
happen among us. Amen.
