soulwerker

NOTE TO READERS: Please read my previous post “Scheming for a Sermon — Part 1” before embarking on this one.

Thankfully, as the morning sun eased up over the horizon today, I had a sermon. By 11:45 a.m., the sermon had been shared with the folks who were in worship this morning. And now, it’s time to let go of the latest effort and move on to the next one. Another sermon is “due” in a few days and there’s no time to dally or dither. My fellow schemers need to hear the Gospel…in all of its clarity, with all its simplicity…even if it means such hearing will require us to act accordingly!

The text for this morning’s effort was Matthew 5:1-11 (the Beatitudes). Today was also All Saints’ Sunday (complete with Holy Baptism). I also needed to make some mention of the fact folks would be receiving a pledge form in the mail in the next few days as we look toward Commitment Sunday on November 20. Whew! No wonder I couldn’t get it all together! So, anyway, what follows is the result of all of the wrangling. I still think it’s too clunky, but for today (with apologies to “SK”), it’s the best I could do.

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“The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly.”  — Soren Kierkegaard

I’m not sure I altogether agree with “SK’s” viewpoint, but I’m certain of one thing — no matter how easy/difficult it may be to actually understand the Scriptures, the challenge of communicating some of that understanding to a group of folks gathered for a Sunday morning liturgy remains for clergy everywhere (me included!). There’s nothing I would like better than to whip up a moderately meaningful, reasonably cogent (and mildly entertaining) sermon in a few hours, give said sermon, forget about it quickly and move on to the next thing on the pastoral list. Presently though, I seem to be going backwards in the “time required for preparation” category. I think I’m devoting more time to such efforts now than when I began preaching a few years back!

Somewhere in seminary, I remember hearing a professor give the following ratio of preparation to preaching. He said, “It takes about two hours of study, reflection, writing, editing and re-writing to produce one minute’s worth of preaching. According to this metric, a twelve minute sermon equates to twenty-four hours of work.” The professor assured us that the more experience we procured the more efficient we would become at the task, thus reducing the amount of time required to prepare a passable sermon.

After this past week, I think I need a remedial homiletics course! At first I couldn’t think of a theme for the sermon. Then I couldn’t develop a plot trajectory that would somehow get all of the disparate parts of the sermon to “talk to” each other. Everything seemed “clunky”. Poor sentence structure. Serpentine thought processes. The sermon seemed to be trying to do “too much” one minute and not really accomplishing much of anything the next. Whole paragraphs were written, re-written, tweaked, re-read and deleted. A sermon that had been “mostly done” by Friday, was nowhere-near-done by Saturday morning and was thoroughly scrapped by Saturday evening. Thank God I get an extra hour as a result of the switch back to Standard Time!

Given “SK’s” comment, I have to wonder: underneath all of this homiletical angst, am I really just a scheming swindler? What are the ways I want to escape from the simplicity of the Scriptures? How do I  hide the obvious messages contained in the Bible under the tarp of exegetical complexity? Aggravating questions that spin in my head incessantly…even when I beg myself to “let go and just write the durned thing!”

“O God of grace and glory, deliver me from my self-centered scheming. Give me eyes to see and ears to hear the clarity of your Good News for all people contained in the words of Holy Scripture. I ask this in the Name of the Eternal Word, Jesus, Son of Mary. Amen.” 

I’ve worked at some sort of job since I was fifteen years old. I’ve mowed lawns, cleaned apartments, painted houses, pumped gas, mopped floors, scrubbed bathrooms and shingled roofs. I’ve sold newspaper advertising, encyclopedias and insurance products of all sorts. For a while I was a Fuller Brush guy. I even tried my hand at working in retail as one of the original cadre of booksellers at the first Barnes and Noble store in Jacksonville, Florida.

I’ve worked every shift — days, evenings and nights (and after working the night shift for six months, I know why they call it “graveyard”!). I’ve worked every major holiday. For the year I worked in the gas station, I worked 15 hour days Monday through Friday and then finished the week with a 10 hour day on Saturday (for a total of 85 hours/week @ $3.50/hour with no overtime pay). I was able to survive during this time because I lived with my sister “rent free”.

Through the years I’ve been unemployed and underemployed. Sometimes I was working two or three jobs simultaneously. I have only rarely had jobs that routinely provided the “weekend off”.

As the “Occupy” demonstrations continue, from time to time I hear folks critical of the demonstrators say, “Those people need to get off the street and get a job!” I suspect there are some of the “occupiers” who’d like nothing better than to have a job to go to. And my guess is, that, in some cases, their unemployed status isn’t for a lack of effort to find work — any sort of work — but for whatever reason, at this moment, there is no work to be found.

This is a difficult time in our country for many. The unemployed. The underemployed. The folks living with the stress of knowing their jobs could vanish or be shipped overseas at any moment. I don’t have any answers to the difficult questions posed by this continuing economic situation. But I don’t believe such answers will be discovered by simply yelling at each other.  I think we will actually need to take the time to listen to a point of view that may differ from our own.

Call me naive, but I really do believe most folks in this country desire the dignity of having work that pays a living wage. Perhaps the people who are making those seven figure bonuses forget the “little people” who make their bonuses possible. I’m pretty sure many of the folks in the work of government have forgotten they were elected to serve both their constituency and the ideals foundational to this country (not just worry about how to get re-elected).

I keep thinking that I ought to take some sort of concrete action, but I honestly don’t know what sort of action that would be. Maybe my own desire to take action is similar to what has fueled both the “Occupy” demonstrations AND the Tea Party Rallies. Maybe standing on the street with placards or talking into microphones represent our collective desire to be part of a conversation which so rarely takes the time to invite our input or bother to thoughtfully listen when the input is offered. Or maybe people simply want to feel like “words and witness” can make a difference in a world where circumstances so often seem to be beyond our control.

As for me, my work takes place amongst a constituency of about five hundred souls who gather somewhat regularly on a little corner in a moderately-sized suburb of a smallish metropolitan area in the Upper Midwest. We rarely have tea parties and we mostly occupy church pews. At the end of each liturgy we pray some version of “and now (God) send us out to do the work you have given us to do with gladness and singleness of heart.” Our work is that of proclaiming Good News — through words and actions — in our homes, neighborhoods and schools…and at our places of employment (if we’re fortunate enough these days to have such a place).

Sometimes, my particular work as a clergy person doesn’t look much like work — a few e-mails, some meetings, a dinner here or there, more meetings, talking for a few minutes every couple of weeks. Unlike painting a house or shingling a roof, it’s difficult to stop at the end of the day and see what’s been produced. Unlike farming, the harvest shows up in parish life in little ways, here and there, rather than intensely and abundantly at the end of a growing season.  But, this is the work I have and it’s my job to keep at it. This job includes (at the very least) praying for those who don’t have work, for those who seem to be making a handsome profit at the expense of those standing in the unemployment line, and for those who are charged with the creation of a just society through the governmental process. Most days, I don’t know how to most effectively pray in the midst of such complexities. On days like today when I feel the least able to make any sort of difference at all, I’m called by this peculiar vocation to do the work that doesn’t look like work and trust such work will be enough. Today I pray God will help me do both — work and trust.

As a child (indeed until I became an Episcopalian) I had never heard of “All Saints’ Day” or the “Feast of the Holy Name”. November 1 was simply the day to sort out the haul of Halloween candy from the night before. January 1 was the day my family sorted through the remains of Christmas decorations and stowed them away for the ensuing eleven months. As a child, I experienced both days as sad occasions — no more trick-or-treating; no more Christmas presents. Both days marked “endings” for me.

Even though I was raised in a Christian household where church attendance, Bible reading and personal devotion were strongly encouraged, there was no overt connection between the home, school and work calendars and any sort of “calendar of faith.” My ignorance as to the significance of November 1 and January 1 was the result of an unintended alliance between secular America and austere Protestantism. One of the interesting aspects of this country is our ability to gut holy days (i.e., “holidays”!) of their historic connection to the sacred and recast them into a profit-driven marketing opportunity with all of the surgical precision of eviscerating a pumpkin to bring forth a Jack-o-Lantern. For hardline Protestants the call to live “beyond this world” meant not paying much attention to the world we were living in and salvation was purely an individual matter without much thought to how God’s wholeness is reflected in the diversity of the “blessed company of all faithful people.”

All Saints’ Day celebrates the “great cloud of witnesses”, who surround us in ways beyond our knowing (Hebrews 12:1). This holy day reminds us of our connection to the community of those who have gone before us. Some of those saints are remembered for their mighty acts or robust dedication. The identities of the vast multitude of the saints, however, have long since been forgotten. To celebrate All Saints’ is to confront our dependence and transience.  We didn’t come to faith through the triumph of an individual choice, but rather, we were gifted with the Faith through faithful people who said their prayers, raised their children, lived their lives and died in the hope of the Resurrection.

The Feast of the Holy Name proclaims the scandal of particularity — that God, the Creator takes up residence within creation and  lives the divine life from the inside of a tent of flesh and blood. On January 1, the Church calls us to receive the God who dwells in the vastness of eternity but who, nonetheless, takes up time and space in human history. For Christians, this enfleshed God has a name — (“above all names” according to Philippians 2:9) — “Jesus”. Christians say that because of the birth, life, ministry, death and Resurrection of God-with-us, humanity is taken up into the very life of God’s Self.

All Saints’ and Holy Name don’t get much attention. Most parishes move the observance of All Saints’ to the Sunday following November 1st in recognition of the challenge inherent in getting people to attend a worship opportunity during the week. Observing Holy Name mostly occurs every few years when January 1 happens to fall on a Sunday (New Year’s Day is simply too much competition). But, I think it’s significant that the last two months of the calendar year are bookended by these two holy days.

We live our lives within this dynamic interplay between community and individuality — at the nexus of All Saints’ and Holy Name. Jesus was given his name at the time of his circumcision. This name was not merely an identifier . The act of naming simultaneously set Jesus apart and connected him to all of salvation history — the Covenant between the Hebrew people and God, the Exodus, the Exile, the Return. All of those stories were part of Jesus’ story, just as the stories of Jesus’ life, ministry, death and resurrection have become part and parcel of our respective stories. When we baptize people, we say their names, recognizing their uniqueness as individuals even as we submerge them into the community of the faithful — the Church — the Body of Christ.

These two holy days are poignant reminders that love does surround us on every hand. We were loved before we were even born. Loved by people who would never see us or know us — the saints who passed the Faith from generation to generation until that Faith finally landed within us. Yet even as we take our place within that cloud of witnesses, we are also loved in our individuality and uniqueness — loved by the God who knows each of us by name.