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The Rev. Frank
Logue Romans 12:1-18 This sermon comes with a guarantee—two guarantees in fact. I guarantee that Ted Clarkson is only human and I guarantee that he will disappoint you. These are not guesses or negative predictions. It is a fact that he is only human and a certainty that he will disappoint you. I am quite sure that Ted will not disappoint you to be malicious. No, Ted is going to disappoint you while trying his darndest to be a faithful pastor to St. Cyprian’s and St. Andrew’s Churches. In fact, he will likely disappoint you while trying hard to do what he feels is best for these congregations. And that’s OK, because keeping everyone happy all the time is not in his job description and it wouldn’t be possible if it were. Here is another reality check. You will expect Ted to be a person of prayer, grounded in the scripture and in practices of personal piety like daily Morning and Evening Prayer and regular times of rest and reflection. And then you, unintentionally I am sure, do everything in your power to prevent Ted from having the time he needs for prayer and the study of scripture. Okay, I have some more guarantees. I guarantee that y’all are only human and I guarantee that y’all will disappoint one another and sometimes you’ll make Ted wonder why he ever thought he was cut out for this whole priest thing. Once again, these are not guesses or negative predictions. It is also a fact that y’all are only human and so everything will not always go perfectly well. Christian community is messy and every once in a while we Christians get under one another’s skin or really cheese each other off and Ted will not be immune to this. The problem is that the call to the job of a pastor can be a call to the impossible. In her recent book, Leaving Church: a memoir of faith, one-time small town pastor now professor and lecturer Barbara Brown Taylor tells of how she came to decide to pursue becoming a small town priest after serving scores of 60- to 80-hour weeks as one of four priests at a large Episcopal church in downtown Atlanta. She writes, I knew I was tired when I started seeing things that were not there. Driving home in the evening, I would see the crushed body of a brown dog lying in the middle of the street up ahead, causing a great howl of grief to rise up inside of me. By the time I reached the corpse, it had turned into a crushed cardboard box instead. When this happened twice in a row, I knew I was tired. Barbara Brown Taylor goes on to write, I had remedies in place to help me keep my pace. I climbed the StairMaster at the gym. I paid monthly visits to a pastoral counselor. I planned vacations to exotic places where there were no telephones. Some guilt was involved in all but the first of these, since I had the idea that the practice of ministry alone should nourish me. Maybe I had read The Diary of a Country Priest too often, or maybe I was too much of a romantic, but I thought God would keep depositing funds in my account whenever my balance got low. I thought all that I had to do was give myself fully to the work, and God would keep me in business. Instead, I was seeing a lot of corpses in the road, and telling myself they were not really there did nothing to diminish my grief. Her experience may be a bit extreme, but at some level it was perfectly predictable. No matter how Holy Ted Clarkson is or will become, he will go spiritually bankrupt right here in your midst if he does not have the time he needs to stay connected to God. Without time for prayer, scripture reading and other important spiritual practices, his own spiritual journey will take a detour in the desert even as St. Andrew’s and St. Cyprian’s thrive. For the church is a jealous mistress and a pastor can feel quite justified in denying their own spouse and children in the pursuit of ministry. Now y’all are smart folks and pretty well spiritually grounded and so I haven’t actually said anything new here this evening. We all know this. We know we are only human and we know that pastors need to take care of themselves even as they care for a congregation. You know this as well as I do. But it is worth holding up tonight that there is another way that doesn’t even skirt the edges of a burn out pastor making dead dogs out of cardboard boxes in the median of the road. The other way is the one found in the Bible and the one found in the words of the liturgy for this evening. You see, the Bible knows nothing about a professional minister doing the work of God on behalf of a congregation of believers. The Bible only knows of and describes a life in which every single Christian is a minister no matter their age or ability. You are a minister of the Gospel by virtue of your baptism. Ted’s job is not to be the sole minister in a congregation of his followers. Ted’s job is that of pastor and teacher to a congregation of ministers who all follow Jesus. Look at what Paul wrote in this evening’s reading from Romans,
Within the portion of the Body of Christ which is the two Episcopal Churches here in Darien, you have been blessed mightily with a variety of members who each bring their own gifts both to the community and to the congregations. Paul says that the gifts you have are according to the grace given you by God. So while each of you has a ministry no matter the age or ability, your gift to the congregation will be different depending on your ability. A well functioning body does not have the foot serving as a hand or an ear trying to pretend that it is an eye. In church terms this means that your congregations will thrive when people are doing the ministry God built him or her to do. Take someone built to work behind the scenes planning and coordinating and put that person out in front speaking and leading and you have your body parts out of order. But when you get people with the right gifts in the right job, it is so much easier. Take Ted, who God created to pastor a congregation and give him a chance to do just that and you will see him thrive. But if you burden him with a lot of other junk better handled by someone else, you’ll make each other unhappy. It’s all about discovering the gifts in your congregations and unleashing those gifts in service both within St. Cyprian’s and St. Andrew’s and within McIntosh County. Paul tells us in glowing terms what Christian community is like at its best. He writes,
This is what happens when we live in harmony with one another and is not possible when the Body gets out of sorts. Harmony in music comes when each voice simultaneously hits complementary notes in a chord. When a group sings a chord, each person is hitting their own note and together the notes create the chord. Similarly a church in which each person lives into their baptismal ministry by using the gifts God has given them is a congregation in harmony. This may sound a little touchy feely and not too grounded in reality at first. But the words of our liturgy this evening claim the effect it measurable and I think that is so. As I complete my sermon, the service will continue with words which will remind us that,
So the harmony within St. Andrew’s and St. Cyprian’s will never depend upon Ted Clarkson or anyone else other than Jesus Christ. The health and harmony of your congregations depends instead on the ability of each of you to live into the promises you made to our Lord in baptism. And in this task, Ted is responsible to use his God-given gifts in his ministry of Word and Sacrament as he helps you to identify and exercise your own gifts for ministry. And here comes the final guarantee of my sermon. This guarantee is not hyperbole or some overly positive prognostication. For I guarantee that if you will be faithful as you can be in living in to the covenant you make this evening with your new pastor, that God will be more than faithful to give you the mix of gifts you need to transform Darien to the glory of God. Amen.
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