I really love those signs you see in
some workplaces. “You want it when?”
“Quality, Price, Speed: Choose Any
Two”. My favorite, though, is the
time-honored, “You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps.” Those of us who work in churches know
something about all three signs. We live
under the constant pressure of the tyranny of the urgent. We are always trying to do more than we have
resources for. And our work lives are
dominated by intense, interpersonal relations with parishioners, coworkers, and
ourselves. Nobody goes into this
business to make a lot of money, and nobody goes into it who doesn’t carry a personal
burden of some kind. And nobody goes
into it who hasn’t, in one way or another, felt the personal touch of God.
Why do we do what we do? As a former seminary person, I have long
pondered the mystery of why people go to work in the church. I know a priest/therapist who firmly believes
that all clergy were what they call “parentified children” when they were
young. According to him, those of us who
gravitate toward church work grew up by functioning as adults before we were
ready to do so, and we spend the rest of our lives fitting neatly into that
role. There are all kinds of ways to
psychologize people who give their lives over to serving God and the world. In
the 1960’s, the great psychologist Robert Coles was criticized by his
colleagues at the Harvard Health Service for refusing to diagnose the students
who went on Freedom Rides as neurotic.
Some impulses, Coles felt, went beyond analysis. Call it conscience, call it faithfulness,
call it the Holy Spirit. We do what we
do because something both within ourselves and from outside ourselves prompts
us to. Like the Richard Dreyfus
character in Close Encounters of the
Third Kind, we follow these promptings not because we’re better or nicer or
smarter than other people. We follow them because we have no other choice.
Tonight we gather to say thank you
and goodbye to three of our colleagues:
The Reverend Canon Kim Turner Baker, our Canon Pastor; Duke DuTeil, our
Head Verger, and Richard Weinberg, Director of Communications. Because this is a valediction and not a
funeral, I will not attempt to eulogize them.
But I’d like you to think with me for a couple more minutes about our
readings tonight and what they say to us as we send these friends and
colleagues off to the next phases of their lives and ministries.
In the Old Testament reading
tonight, we heard this: “You shall be
holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” [Leviticus 19: 2b] A series of
commandments, both ritual and ethical, follows that statement. As important as those commandments are,
though, we should not let them obscure the basic premise of Yahweh’s charge to
the people of Israel. “You shall be
holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” We do what we do—we follow Jesus, we
worship God, we spread the Word—primarily because we have experienced holiness
in some primary and powerful way. In her
great little book On Beauty, the
Harvard philosophy professor Elaine Scarry says that our primary response to
the beautiful is the desire to replicate it.
In the same way, for those of us who experience the holy, our primary
response to it is the desire to make it available to others. Some of us do that through preaching and
teaching. Some of us do that through
pastoral care. Some of us do that
through liturgy and music and the care of beautiful buildings like this one. Some of us even do that through seemingly
secular means like public relations.
Whatever the avenue, all of us who love and work in the church do so
because we want to extend the experience we have had of the One whose presence
we feel in ineffable and numinous ways.
Sometimes, given the highly
interpersonal nature of this work, we can become overwhelmed by stress and
conflict, and working in the church can feel more like laboring in a sausage
factory than serving as custodians of the divine. That’s why it’s important that people who
work in the church pray together: so we
can remain grounded in the fundamental experience that brought us here. “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God
am holy.” As we stay connected and
present to God’s holiness, we can exemplify and live out our own.
Our Gospel reading for this evening
is from the 15th chapter of John’s Gospel:
Abide in me as I
abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides
in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the
branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from
me you can do nothing. [John 15: 3-5]
In this familiar analogy, Jesus is
the vine and we are the branches. Paul’s
metaphor uses the body: Jesus is the
head, we are the members. However we
think of God, Jesus, and the church, it’s clear that we are all in this
together. If the first reading reminded
us of why we do all this in the first place, the second tells us that we need
both each other and God if we are to do anything truly meaningful and lasting.
“Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine,
neither can you unless you abide in me.”
Apart from God and Jesus, we can do nothing. Apart from each other, we can do less. Jesus left behind him a community who would
live out his love and purpose in the world.
And it is in living out his love and purpose in the world—not in celebrating
ourselves or advancing our own personal agendas—that we live out and keep faith
with the call that brings us together to work in blessed and complicated places
like Washington National Cathedral.
“You
want it when?” “Quality, Price, Speed:
Choose Any Two”. “You don’t have
to be crazy to work here, but it helps.”
We are holy only because God is holy.
We are empowered to serve only as we are in and with God, Jesus, and
each other. I am so grateful to all of
you for being the body of Christ with me and our brother and sister followers
of Jesus, and I am so grateful to Kim and Duke and Richard for the ways they
are members of that body and so will stay a part of us as they go forth from
this place. For them, for their work and
ministries, for their love and dedication to this place, for their friendship
and their collegiality, let us all proceed to give thanks. Amen.
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