The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany

Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Frank Dunn

February 5, 2012 at St. Paul's Parish, Kent

Occupational Hazard

 

When any of us stops and thinks about it, even a little bit, we know that life is not simple.  It isn’t just black and white.  True, we might make life needlessly complicated sometimes.  But most of the things that we face every day require some degree of discernment.  Quick fixes rarely work for long.  Somebody has said, “If you can’t fix it with duct tape, it’s not worth having.  And if it can be fixed with duct tape, it’s not worth having.”  Do you work?  You know that the job is rare where you have no frustrations, usually caused by human beings who don’t know as much as you do about what they’re doing.  Do you have a family?  Tell me that the relationships among spouses, parents and children, children and parents, among siblings, with relatives are simple!  No, they are not—at least not for most people.  Nor do vocational questions always have a clear answer.  Nor do our bodies lend themselves to easy patch jobs when something major goes awry.  Say what you will, life is not all that simple.

 

Little surprise then that significant differences, tensions, polarities, emerge for us every day.  Sometimes we are out of balance.  Sometimes we don’t even know what needs balancing, or indeed what is balance.  Today’s gospel gives us a glimpse of the tensions in Jesus’ life and ministry.  We see him at Capernaum healing Peter’s mother-in-law, and then on top of that a whole crowd of people who are ill.  The next day, still in the wee hours of the morning, he sneaks out to a deserted place and prays.  These two episodes back-to-back point up the vocational rhythm that  characterizes Jesus’ ministry.  Does it surprise you that two millennia later we would have the same need?

 

Rest always follows work, or should.  Action follows prayer, which follows action.  There is an in-and-out rhythm, an advance/retreat dynamic that runs through all of Jesus’ ministry.  And because the Church’s reason for existing is precisely to carry on Jesus’ ministry, that rhythm and that dynamic runs through our ministry as well.

 

Or does it?

 

I was once rector of a parish that had quite a lot of money.  An old bachelor who spent most of his life working at a local bank, a scion of one of the town’s oldest families, died one day.  When his will was read, the parish church discovered that it had inherited his house and virtually his entire estate.  At the time, around 1958, it was valued at around $1 million.  The parish had been in debt for  years on end, and had lived on a shoestring for much of is 225 year history.  Suddenly when it came into money, what do you think happened?  If you guess that people began to fight about how to spend it—or not—you would be right.  There weren’t gross parish fights that sent people to the hospital.  But folks gradually developed a culture of competing for the dollars that were now available.  Much good ministry was done in the beginning.  Interracial relationships were established with a partner parish.  The first and only parish house was built, largely made possible through the newly inherited money.  Inevitably two camps emerged.  One we’ll call the IAAO camp, “It’s All About Outreach.”  The other was what I’d call the WGM camp, “Why Give More?”  Their theory was that the parish now had quite enough to take it into a comfortable old age and thus did not need their tithes and offerings.  Not only that, but they thought that the largess of the old bachelor should be used to keep up the building, to finance a good music program, and to do good Christian education and youth ministry.  “Do it,” they said, “and the church will grow stronger.  What we need are programs.”  And, of course, both camps had a point.  Many in fact joined neither or joined both camps precisely because they could see value in both positions.

 

The parish did not exactly become polarized, in the usual sense of the word, but there was clearly a polarity that I have since seen in any number of places.  I’d call it the mission/maintenance polarity.  Now the very nature of polarities is that they are here to stay, for the most part.  Not only that, but contrary to what some of us think, there is no “right side” and “wrong side” to a polarity.  Jesus’ ministry was not all about healing and feeding and teaching.  It was also about prayer, about withdrawal.  None of that is too hard to see, and we instinctively know that it takes both these wings for the bird to fly.

 

But there is something that enters the mix for the contemporary church that Jesus did not have to confront.  And that is the reality that, like it or not, the Church is an institution.  Although I can’t prove it, and there certainly are many who would disagree, I do not imagine that Jesus really was interested in establishing an institution, and cannot imagine that Jesus is all that interested in institutional life now.  What do you think?  Is that a terrible idea?  Do you want to know where I am coming from?  I speak as one who has spent four decades now serving the institution called “Church,” and about 98% of the time I have loved it.  So I am not an anti-institutional guy.  Yet nothing I read in the gospels suggests to me that Jesus was interested in many of the things that we preoccupy ourselves with or get worked up about.  As I read those gospels, and much else in the New Testament, what comes across to me is that Jesus was very much interested in attitudes.  It seems quite clear that he was terribly concerned about the poor, the lost, the sick, the hungry, and those who were on the margins of society, those who had no standing in the religious community.  It seems to me that he got into trouble precisely because he set himself on the side of the have-nots, especially those whom the religious establishment thoroughly disdained, and whose Law backed them up in their positions.  Were it not for all that, I am reasonably sure that Jesus would never have been crucified, because other than his advocacy for the poor and the oppressed, he was really not all that different from either the Old Testament prophets or from many of his contemporaries.  Yet he did what he did not because he was in the business of making friends and influencing people but because he believed that the healing, the feeding, the loosing of bonds, the setting prisoners free, the proclamation of Good News were precisely what God was about and cared about.  Those things were the Kingdom of God to him.  And he was interested in making them as important to you and to me as they were to him.

 

Not even a century after Jesus, and his movement, initially known as “The Way,” had morphed into community with a hierarchy.  A few short centuries later, it had become an institution with its own rules and regulations.  It didn’t take long for the Church to meld with the Empire that had in fact put Jesus to death.  We still are yoked to the Empire, though it changes names and brands every hundred years or so, and though the Empire has learned how to market itself with great appeal.

 

But you and I know that there is more to the Church than that.  We know that at its best, the Church can still be a movement, not just an organization; a way of life, not a way of social conformity; an instrument of freedom, not the means of oppression.  We know this because for many of us it has been the Church, gathered in Word and Sacrament, washing feet on Maundy Thursday, breaking into joy at baptisms, erupting in alleluias on Easter, burying our dead and laying hands on us when sick, feeding us with this mysteriously satisfying Bread and Wine that is exactly where we have met and do meet Jesus, where we sense the touch of God, where we have met even our adversaries and have experienced the transforming power of love.

 

And for that reason alone, the Church needs to be maintained.  It needs leaders, resources, and in this world, it needs members who can tell the Story of God’s love with grace and power, a story that they not only know and tell but live persuasively.  The polarity of maintenance and mission is just that, and we need both.  But the polarity is not a dichotomy.  We cannot settle for a superficial fuzzing of the two, ignoring one or the other.

 

“Where are you?” asked the disciples on that morning when Jesus got up long before the dew.  “Everybody is looking for you.”  Everybody is always looking for something that seems to be missing—usually more of what we already have and already believe to be of great importance

 

“Let us go on to the next towns and proclaim the message there also, for that is what I came to do,” is Jesus’ reply.  He does not lose sight of his mission.  He is focused on what lies beyond the polarity popping up in any given moment.  And living in the rhythms of ministry keeping our hearts and minds focused on the Message and our part in proclaiming it:  that is to be the Body of Christ called “Church” here and now.

 

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012