Proper 19B
In the name of Christ, our
example. Amen.
Back in the 80s, there was this
TV show that I would stay up and watch, late at night on the weekends. In my mind, I was hiding it from my mother,
but in hindsight, I’m sure she probably knew everything I was doing
anyway… But it was called “Tales from
the Crypt” – and it told a new horror story every week.
Well, this week, rather than
“Tales from the Crypt”, I’m going to share with you another kind of horror
story: “Tales from the Church Office”…
It was several years ago – don’t
worry, I’m not telling tales out of school about anyone here - It was several
years ago when I was serving a small parish in Jersey City. Shortly before I’d arrived, the Interim had
fired the Parish Administrator, and the work was being done by a
volunteer. Not long after starting my
work, I learned that she’d recently lost her job, and that was why she suddenly
had time to do the work. So, rather than
going through an exhaustive search process, and probably never finding anyone
anyway, because it was such a small, part-time job, I broke every rule in the
book and allowed the volunteer to continue as our Parish Administrator, though
I insisted that we begin paying her: partly to build in some accountability,
but just as much because I knew she really needed the income.
Well… There are reasons that we’re not supposed to
hire parishioners… The truth is, she
really wasn’t all that bad. We had
occasional disagreements, and sometimes she had a hard time distinguishing
between her role as a church member and her role as a church employee. But where we most often differed, was on
issues around language.
She absolutely could not stand
for me to talk about advertising and marketing related to our parish. She insisted that it should be called
“evangelism”. Sometimes I could really
set her off if I started talking about our “brand”.
But where everything always came
to a head was in crafting the weekly announcements for our Sunday bulletin and
weekly email. Almost every week, she
would have an announcement about something going on in the parish, or in our
outreach work, or whatever else we had going on, and begin the announcement by
saying, “As Father Jon said in his sermon last week…”
The thing was, I’d almost never
actually said it. Sometimes it was even
in direct contrast to what I thought I’d actually said.
I’ve used that story lots of
times when I’ve taught preaching classes: what we say and what the people we’re
speaking with hear, isn’t always the same thing.
And Michael and I have faced this
in our own lives. Me, being a native
Southerner, and him, being a native Brooklynite – we often communicate in ways
the other doesn’t understand. For the
first year of our relationship, I was convinced he was always angry with me,
and he was convinced I was always being passive aggressive with him. About a year in, we finally started being
able to actually understand one another.
So, this seemingly simple story
from the life of Jesus, really represents a more profound understanding of
humanity than it initially lets on: “Who do people say that I am?”
Jesus knew that was he said
wouldn’t always translate into what people heard.
Where the translation was
clearer, however, was in the doing. The
people may not have understood what he said – we may sometimes struggle to understand what he said – but the
doing made it a little clearer. It was
in the teaching, and the healing, and the loving the unloved and including the
cast-aside – that’s where the people really began to understand who this
“Jesus” – this son of a carpenter – who he really was.
The same is true for us. We work hard at putting our best foot forward
– helping our community around us to know who we are and what we stand for;
helping them to see the realm of Christ realized right here through our
outreach and mission – through the ways that we exclaim God’s love to those
around us. But no matter how beautiful
our words may be; no matter how welcoming our liturgy may be; no matter how
moving our music may be – it’s really in all that we do that we’ll begin to
help people understand that this place is an expression and an extension of
God’s love reaching out into the world.
We’d be wise, from time to time,
to ask that question that Jesus modeled for us: who do the people we serve say
that we are? We certainly say a lot
about ourselves: in our weekly emails, on the sign out front, on our website,
on Facebook… But who do the people
around us say that we are? Do they say
anything at all? Do they even know we’re
here?
The answer isn’t to shout louder,
but to live more boldly. To serve Christ
more authentically. To love more fully. If we’re really reckless – the way God recklessly
loves humanity enough to choose to be a part of it – if we really do reach
deeper and pattern our lives even more after Christ, our “doing” will shape our
“saying”, but even more, it will effect what the people we serve can hear. And, just like Christ, the “doing” will mean
more than anything we can say, or anything they can hear. Amen.
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