The Graces of Our Callings

1 Peter 2:2-10
May 22, 2011
Our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers have a more expansive list of official sacraments of the church. I’m offering no opinion on whether or not that’s a good thing; it simply is the truth of the matter. They have seven; we have two.
Among the official sacraments of the Roman church is the sacrament of Holy Orders, or what we refer to as ordination. We are just coming through the beginning of the end (I hope) of our denomination’s long struggle over one aspect of ordination – that is to say, over who may and who may not be ordained.
But in one crucial way, we are all ordained. We are all called to ministries. We all have our orders, as it were, and they are holy.
Broadening our perspective on what it means to be ordained might just help us live more fully into the new reality of the denomination. When each of us claims our own calling, claims our own ordination to ministry, and understands the sacramental nature of our callings, it becomes easier to see more clearly in each other the gifts for ministry that God has given us.
Broadening our understanding of the sacramental nature of so much of life ought to change the way we look at a lot of things, and broadening our view of ordination, in particular, ought to change the way we look at the manner in which we spend so much of our lives: that is to say, it ought to change the way we look at our work.
But to begin with, before blowing up, tossing out or replacing any definitions, let’s just put it out there baldly: ordination is a visible sign of an invisible grace. In other words, ordination is sacramental. Moreover, let’s put it out there as well that building fences around just a few recognized “offices” in the church – elder, deacon, minister of word and sacrament – my help us organize churches but it may just get in the way of actually being the church.
To be called by God, and to be blessed in that calling by the gathered community – that is the fundamental understanding of ordination that has guided the church for a long, long time. Indeed, it goes all the way back to Paul, who understood that various members of the church – of the body of Christ in the world – had various gifts and various callings to use those gifts for the good of the whole community.
Paul may have been thinking only of the community of Christians, but our challenge is far bigger: how do we use these gifts of ministry for the good of the wider world?
Stepping outside of the institutional structures of the church, which have their place and purpose, I want to conflate for now the idea of ordination and that of calling. For the purposes of our conversation today, they mean the same thing. There is some of this conflation already going on in Paul’s great riff on gifts and call in his first letter to the young church at Corinth:
“Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers; then deeds of power, then gifts of healing, forms of healing, forms of leadership, various kinds of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret? But strive for the greater gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way.”
Our passage from First Peter is also concerned with gift and call, but there’s a different emphasis:
“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”
We should hear some tension between these two passages.
The tension rests on the essential pivot between individual calling, on the one hand, and the calling of the entire community on the other. Paul, in writing to the Corinthians, is concerned about in-fighting in the church and he insists that there are as many gifts as there are members, that each and all of them have important roles to play, and that, basically, they ought to quit squabbling over it and get on about the business of the church – which is the business of showing forth God’s love in the world. That is the more excellent way toward which he points in the great hymn to love that follows the words we just read.
There’s a whole lot going on in First Peter, but the social tensions that prompted this letter existed not inside the faith community but rather between the faith community and the larger Greco-Roman culture. Let me pause for a moment to mention that the version of this sermon that will be posted on the sermon blog has a long footnote here that goes into the weeds of Pauline authorship, patriarchy and other historical notes that you may find interesting, but that are not directly germane to the key point.
The crucial thing is not simply getting some more or less interesting historical information. The crucial thing is how we make use of these texts in our own context, in our own lives. For this morning’s purpose, the main point – the “take-away,” as it were – is simply this: we are all called, individually and as a community, to the ministry of reconciliation that Jesus launched.
So, what of that calling? What of your calling? What of our calling as church?
We say in our worship bulletin every single week that all of the members of the community are the ministers of the church. To each of us and to all of us has been given this ministry and the wide variety of gifts for carrying it out in the wider world. We have all been ordained to this ministry. It is our common calling.
When we do it well, we do make grace visible in the world. It is sacramental. Our several callings are sacramental. Vocation is a sacrament, and not just in the Roman church. That is to say, we can and do make grace visible in the wider world when we go about our work responding to the Spirit’s moving in our lives – and in every aspect of them.
The idea of vocation clearly touches on our work lives in some fashion, and this should raise questions for us. Do you consider what you do for a living to be a calling? If not, does what you do for a living support your callings? Does what you do for a living conflict with your callings?
Note that I’m using the plural – while most of us have only one job that pays us, we all have several callings. For example, I feel a deep sense of call to this job – that’s one calling that happens to coincide with my job. On the other hand, I do not feel called to every aspect of the job. Some of it I do because it has to get done, whether or not I feel ordained to it: locking up the doors; changing out light bulbs; minor repairs; furniture moving – I don’t feel called to it, but I do it and, to some degree, it does support my calling.
On the other hand, I have a deep a sense of call to parenting – that’s a separate calling and while it is certainly work it is not a job because nobody pays me for doing it. Or, if they do, the check keeps getting lost in the mail. Sometimes my call to parenting conflicts with my call to ministry. Sometimes it supports it.
Likewise with being husband. Those are not just roles that we play; they are callings of God, or they can be. Surely there are folks who get married and have children but have no gifts or callings toward either, and we’ve all witnessed the results.
All of which is simply to say, all of us have several callings, several vocations, to which we have been ordained by God. Sometimes they coincide with our jobs. Sometimes they conflict. Sometimes they coincide with each other; sometimes they conflict. These callings, our vocations, touch on every important aspect of our lives. But most of us do not think about them as sacramental: as signs and as means of grace.
What difference would it make to think of these callings, these vocations, as sacramental? Parenting as sacrament? Being a husband or a wife as a sacrament? Our job as a sacrament?
“You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”
So, what difference would it make to think of this “chosenness,” these callings, these vocations, as sacramental? Parenting as sacrament? Being a husband or a wife as a sacrament? Our jobs as sacraments?

Life Abundant

May 15, 2011
John 10:1-10; Acts 2:42-47
Have you ever thought of your body as sacramental? That is to say, have you ever considered your body as a visible sign of an invisible grace? Have you ever thought of your body as a means of grace, a way for grace to be made manifest in the world? Have you ever thought of your body as a sacrament?
Consider the texts for this morning. Acts tells the story of the first Christians, known simply as the people of the way. They embodied the faith in ways that few of us dare consider, much less actually try out. Living in community, attentive and attuned to signs and wonder and awe.
“All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.”
How could you live like that? Imagine it. Think of your stuff. All of your stuff.
I can’t actually do that, because I don’t know how much stuff I have, but just for starters, take my bag. I carry this with me almost all of the time. I had a free bag – swag from last summer’s General Assembly. That bag replaced a backpack that remains in perfectly fine condition. I just decided that I wanted to go “messenger style” for a while. I really ought to hear a cautionary note with the word “style” there.
Be that as it may, I liked this bag so I bought it. I can’t remember how much I paid, but it was at least 50 bucks. Fifty dollars … more than the average daily wage of 85 percent of the world’s population.
Still, I need a bag … because I have all this stuff.
My laptop. I must have that, of course, to write with and stay connected and all of those other things I do. My books. I can’t live without them. My phone. Certainly need that.
I’m really not making fun of myself here. I can justify all of this stuff. More or less legitimately, but, still, as I make the case for my stuff I do see Jesus sitting across from me with a wry smile – not one of judgment but rather one of deep understanding – understanding that the only one I’m fooling as I justify all of my stuff is me.
I suspect most of us fall into this same pattern. The entire culture tells us that we should consume, that it is not only our right but that it is a good thing to do. Mass consumption is so all-pervasive in our culture that we take for granted that it has been ever thus, and that there is no other way to organize a culture or an economy, and that we are all the better for it, and that we are, well, “happy.”
The first, and perhaps only, American beatitude is this: happy are those who shop.
But what if we paused for a moment to consider the church in Acts.
They were all together, sharing what they had, and selling off their stuff so that everyone would have enough, and they were happy.
The text tells us that day by day people were being added to their number – sometimes thousands per day. That only happens when something powerfully attractive is happening. Thousands of folks don’t look at a dour, unhappy band, no matter how fabulously tricked out, and suddenly say, “wow! I want some of what they’re having!” No. That’s not what attracts. Abundant life! That’s what attracts; and that’s what Jesus promised, and promises still.
By stripping away the stuff, getting down to real lives, real relationships, lives were transformed. It’s tempting to take “the thief” Jesus calls out in John and equate him with all those places, people and institutions in the culture that call us to clothe ourselves in stuff, stuff and more stuff, but it suffices to leave that figure alone this morning and focus instead on the abundance that Jesus promises – an abundance that clearly has nothing to do with the stuff, and, as it turns out, everything to do with what we’ve already been given: our bodies.
That seems somehow backward – getting rid of stuff to get to abundance.
But I think the lesson here is simply this: we have been given what we need from the very beginning.
We’re given a creation teeming with life, and all the richness that we need to sustain our lives is built in. We are given these bodies – these feet for walking the earth, these hands for reaching out to give and to receive the bounty of the earth, these eyes for seeing beauty – for seeing one another, these ears for hearing the great hymn of creation. We are given these bodies for meeting one another, and for meeting God – in the flesh, as it were.
If you are thinking now of the Eden story, then I have done my job. Our bodies, naked before God, are the first visible sign of the grace of creation.
I think that’s why the two official sacraments of the Reformed church are so bodily in nature: baptism – the washing over our bodies of cool, clear water; communion – taking into our mouths bread and juice, tasting the presence of a grace that we cannot see. The sacraments are sensual, bodily.
This thought is nothing new. Almost 700 years ago, Julian of Norwich wrote: "So I understood our sensuality is founded in nature, in mercy and in grace, and this foundation enables us to receive gifts which lead us to endless life. For I saw very surely that our substance is in God, and I also saw that God is in our sensuality, for in the same instant and place in which our soul is made sensual, in that same instant and place exists the city of God, ordained from him without beginning. "
Bodies, of course, come in all sizes, shapes and conditions. They are also the way in which we experience pain and suffering. Ultimately, they are the site of our dying.
This, too, is a Godly thing. As Barbara Brown Taylor puts it, “Pain makes theologians of us all.”
That is to say, the bodily experience of hurt – whether it is the short-term burst pain of a cut or bruise or broken bone, or the long-term experience of chronic pain – real pain brings forth all of the deepest, most difficult questions of life and faith: why? God, why? Why me? Why now? Why, God?
Our bodies are the site, the location of this most fundamental striving for understanding, and they are also the location for our most basic ministries to one another.
I knew a woman in Cleveland who had cancer. When I met her she was already into about the fourth year of a diagnosed six-month life expectancy. I visited her often over the two years I was there, and her life gradually compressed from a whole house, to one floor of the house, and finally to a room in a nursing home. We talked a lot, about all kinds of things, but I realized pretty early on that I left every visit with her feeling like she had ministered to me a whole lot more than the other way around.
So I asked her about that, about how she managed, even in a single small room of a nursing home, to reach out and extend the gift of hospitality and generosity to everyone who came into her room, from ministers of the church to the orderlies who cleaned the space.
She said something like this:
“I don’t waste any time asking “why me? Why do I hurt?” After all, why not me? Instead I just try to keep doing what I’ve always done: love the people I have in the time that I have, and thank God for all of it.”
So she always spent more time asking after me, and my family, and the folks at church whom she didn’t get to see much any more. She was genuinely concerned for their lives, their joys and their suffering such that she didn’t spend much time on her own pain. And she always laughed until she said it made her stomach hurt. Her way through her own concerns was her concern for others.
I don’t know anyone who likes to hurt – although I do know of them. I certainly know a lot of folks who do everything they can to avoid pain. Either way, everybody hurts.
As Taylor puts it:
“There will always be people who run from every kind of pain and suffering, just as there will always be religions that promise to put them to sleep. For those willing to stay awake, pain remains a reliable altar in the world, a place to discover that a life can be as full of meaning as it is of hurt. The two have never canceled each other out and I doubt they ever will, at least not until each of us – or all of us together – find the way through.”
The way through comes in the meetings of our bodies, for the surest way through our own suffering is by way of the suffering of another. Each of us, all along the way, experiences moments of ecstatic joy and of profound hurt. At both extremes, if we can but be awake to it, we find God fully present, and thus our very bodies are the means for experiencing the presence of the Divine.
In countless ways – and in many demonstrable ones as well – we know way more than those early Christians in Acts. But they understood far better than we do that stripping away the clutter of our lives – the stuff that we tote along in our expensive bags – is the best first step we can take to get closer to the Holy, to get closer to one another, and to be bound up more fully with the body of Christ.
If our ethics is grounded in our sacramental theology – and I believe it must be – then there are all kinds of implications that flow from considering our bodies as sacraments. From what and how we consume the stuff of our lives, to the ways in which we encounter the bodies of others – friends, lovers, and enemies alike – if our bodies are signs of grace then this flesh with which we touch and are touched is holy ground – the ground of signs and wonders and awe.
So, have you ever thought of your body as a sacrament?
Now that you have, if only ever-so-briefly, considered that question, what do you think? What difference would it make to think of your body as a sacrament? Amen.

In the Breaking of Bread

Luke 24
May 8, 2011
Last week as we fed our neighbors with the Arlington Street Peoples Assistance Network, Martin noted one particular gentleman whom we’ve served previously. The man has an amazing shock of white hair and a beard that lends credence to the rumor I am here inventing that he was an original touring member of the Grateful Dead. He’s a gregarious, friendly man, and Martin remembered in particular that the guy had disapproved of the behavior of someone else in the line back in December, saying, “some people give us bums a bad name.”
For better and for worse, you get to know people best in the breaking of bread.
I was reminded of that in reading again the story of the long walk to Emmaus, in which the feeble-mindedness of a pair of Jesus’ followers could certainly have given the rest of them a bad name. It takes a complete stranger, so it seems, to explain to these two the significance of the story, and the reality of their own experience. More to the point, it takes the breaking of bread for them to recognize the one who is in their very midst.
There’s a whole lot going on in this little story that comes toward the end of Luke’s gospel. It raises all kinds of questions. To name but a few: why this dialogue? Why the road to Emmaus? Why bread? And, most importantly, what is the word of the Lord for us in this story?
So let’s run through these initial questions briefly before opening up some conversation on that last one.
Why this dialogue along the road?
Wasn’t this simply Jesus’ way? Engaging everyone he met in rich conversation, and understanding that every moment is, as we might say today, a teachable one. Moreover, every moment is also sacramental, or potentially so. Every conversation presents the possibility of revealing invisible grace, of speaking a word of grace into an otherwise ordinary moment.
Luke could have set this story just about anywhere. He wasn’t writing journalism, he was proclaiming gospel. Jesus could have unfolded Moses and the prophets pretty much anywhere, but he writes this as a revelation along the way.
The walking is important. As Barbara Brown Taylor writes in An Altar In the World, “walking [is] one of the most easily available spiritual practices of all.” She goes on to say, “All it takes is the decision to walk with some awareness, both of who you are and what you are doing.” The Emmaus story suggests that an awareness of one’s companions on the journey is also crucial to the spiritual practice, to making the journey itself sacramental.
She writes, “Most of us spend so much time thinking about where we have been or where we are supposed to be going that we have a hard time recognizing where we actually are” – or, in the case of the disciples on the road, with whom we actually are spending our time. So why are they there, on that road?
Why the road to Emmaus? It could be a simple matter of heading home after momentous events in the big city. Emmaus was something of a suburb, although seven miles would be at least a couple of hours journey. It could be that Emmaus stands in for that place that each of us has, or wants to have, to escape when the world is too much, a place of forgetting, perhaps, or of giving up when life has defeated us.
All of that is possible.
Historically, Emmaus was the scene of a famous Maccabean rebel victory related in 1 Maccabees, where Judas Maccabeus urges the rebels on saying, “then all the Gentiles will know that there is one who saves and liberates Israel” (1 Maccabees 4:11). The despairing friends on the road to Emmaus had hoped that Jesus was “the one to liberate Israel” (Luke 24:21). Perhaps the road to Emmaus is the road of violent revolution, but in the breaking of bread Cleopas and his friend recognize the nonviolent Jesus and reverse course and return to the community of the disciples to proclaim again the good news of God’s triumph over the violence of the empire.
All of that is possible, as well.
Luke is the great story teller among the gospel writers. He is the one whose account is always rich in details of place and time, so it comes as no surprise that he would note the passage of time along the road, and be attentive to the fact that the hour gets late.
Say what you will about the ability of Cleopas and his friend to discern the signs of the times, to interpret the law and the prophets, or even to recognize the one who is in their midst, but they absolutely understand the one clear thing that scripture is always about: hospitality.
UCC Pastor Kate Huey puts it this way, “Hospitality isn’t a condescending or begrudging, dutiful sharing […], it’s a kind of openness and welcoming to change and the new learning change brings […]. Hospitality and openness make transformation possible, brought to us from the most unexpected places by the most unlikely people, perhaps even strangers.”
Ultimately, hospitality is not simply about sharing with someone – friend or stranger – our food or even our shelter, it is about giving someone our selves.
Hospitality is sacramental, for it is the visible, tangible, even ingestible sign of the invisible grace of our own lives.
Jesus’ entire life testified to that simple truth, expressed most eloquently in the words that institute our church sacrament of table: “this is my body, broken for you.”
Why bread?
It is the visible sign of the invisible grace of creation.
Think about it – about real, actual, simple bread. A bit of flour – begun as a seed buried in the earth; in this case an invisible sign of an invisible grace, a sign to come of a promised and delivered grace. A bit of yeast, perhaps, – that mysterious, living organism that gives rise, literally, to the fully realized bread. A bit of water – that elemental gift upon which all life depends.
Why bread? Because it is fundamental, in one shape or another, flat, round, rice or wheat or whatever, basic to every culture’s table.
In the breaking of bread, the disciples realize, “hey, we are in the presence of the Holy.”
In the breaking of bread, any time, any where, we are in the presence of the holy.
In the breaking of bread in the A-SPAN line, we are in the presence of the holy.
In the breaking of bread at this table, we are in the presence of the holy.
In the breaking of bread at our own kitchen tables, we are in the presence of the holy.
So, as we consider our common life at Clarendon and our individual lives in the wider world, what is the word of the Lord for us in this simple story of broken bread?