Peoplewatching: A Sermon for Consecration Sunday

[NB: I preached this sermon on November 9, 2014 at Starmount Presbyterian Church in Greensboro, North Carolina. It had been so long since I had been invited to preach anywhere, I couldn't remember the last time. I am, therefore, the more grateful for the encouragement, kindness and generous attention I received from the people of Starmount. The sermon text was Mark 12:41-44.]  

Go to any large retail mall and you’ll see the guys I’m thinking of. Men of a certain age who say, “Okay, honey, you go on and shop. I think I’ll just sit right here.” And the “here” they’re talking about is the quadrangle of sofas placed every hundred yards or so for weary spouses, fussy, footsore children and peoplewatchers.

We all do it. Peoplewatch, that is. Where is your favorite place to peoplewatch? Airports, Waffle Houses, hospital lobbies and ER waiting rooms, the precinct lines on election day, Costco. What about church? Hmm.

If you really want to engage in some world class peoplewatching, I’ll tell you what. Wait till it’s a communion Sunday and show up for worship at a church where people walk forward to receive communion. There you’ll see a cross section of the people of God in all our wondrous variety:  a parade of ages and stages, healthy and infirm, happy and sad, rich and poor, able-bodied and handicapped, well-dressed and not so much.

If it is true that we encounter God in the faces of our brothers and sisters – and it is – then I would like to commend holy peoplewatching. For when I witness the deeply beautiful people God’s love is transforming you into, when I see you making an effort with God’s help to overcome your struggles – and realize that you have chosen to show up here when it would have been so easy not to – especially on Consecration Sunday, for heaven’s sake, then I am helped and encouraged. God speaks to me in you.

It was something like this Jesus was doing when he hiked up his robe that day and sat down just opposite the Temple treasury. The so-called treasury was the container where people on Passover pilgrimage to Jerusalem placed their tithes and offerings. It was an Olympic-size offering plate. The act of putting an offering into the treasury was an important act of worship every pilgrim was expected to check off. So it made sense for Jesus to occupy this prime real estate. This way, his fifteen-minute break could offer a little holy peoplewatching, and no telling who and what he would see.

Nor was he disappointed in what he observed.

Jesus sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the multitude putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. And a poor widow came, and put in two copper coins, which make a penny. And he called his disciples to him and said to them, Truly I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had.

Now the widow is clearly the heroine of this episode. But before we get to the widow, observe something about the other contributors. There are a lot of them, a multitude. They are rich. And they are making very generous contributions – large sums, Mark says – out of their abundance.

The rich are in the majority and they are worshipping God in an appropriate manner by making generous contributions. I pause here because this might come as a relief to prosperous folks who are conscientious Christians. Being blessed by God with prosperity and giving to God generously out of that abundance is in fact the norm for the majority of the people Jesus observes. And I believe it’s the norm for many of us here today.

You see, in making the widow a heroine, Jesus does not make the wealthy into bad guys, and he does not say that they should have contributed all they had. We can take a deep breath and relax.

Now consider the widow for a moment. And since we all get tired of calling her “the widow,” just for today let’s agree to name her … Lois. Why does Lois catch the peoplewatching eye of Jesus?

Well, the fact that she was contributing at all was pretty remarkable. The economic status of widow was down there right next to orphaned children. Being a widow was synonymous with abject poverty. Widows were supposed to be the beneficiaries of charity, but this widow is giving, not receiving. And not only that, she’s giving everything. In offering up her last two coins she gives relatively more percentage-wise than the rich who are giving out of their abundance.

Maybe she had thought about the trip all year, making one last offering to God in Jerusalem before she got so infirm she couldn’t travel anymore. Maybe she had come a long way to do just this one small thing. Two coins were all she had after paying for the journey. Two coins clinking in the plate. What love. What devotion.

God’s accounting system is different than what they use at Ernst & Young or Deloitte and Touche. The amount of my gift – be it $1 or $1 million – is not nearly as important to my spiritual well-being as the amount of my gift in relation to my ability to give.

Which, believe it or not, is good news. Because it means that anyone can stand beside the likes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in heaven’s hall of generous hearts.

You know, among the reasons people give to their church … okay, wait a minute. What are the reasons we give to the church?

·         to worship

·         because there’s a compelling need

·         because someone in our past has taught us to give

·         because Scripture tells us to give

·         and because we have a network of sustaining relationships in the church

For many of us, the last reason may be the strongest. Look around. When you boil it all down, what Consecration Sunday is really about is how actively our hearts are engaged with the work of God in and through these people.

More than a decade ago I made a pastoral call on an elderly parishioner named Teresa. At 99 years, Teresa was easily the oldest member of my suburban Chicago congregation. I went to see her that day to ask on behalf of the church for money – a lot of money. We were hoping to undertake an expensive round of preservation work on a historic building, and I was going to ask Teresa to make the lead gift, the gift that was going to inspire others to give, a major commitment.

Teresa’s daughter Mary Ann had told her why the pastor was calling. When I arrived we had some tea, but quickly got past small talk. I explained what we needed to do, how much it was going to cost and how much I wanted to ask her to consider giving. It was a large number.

And then there was an excruciating fifteen seconds of silence.

When Teresa began to speak, she said, I was baptized in this church 99 years ago. I was confirmed in this church. I was married here. My children and grandchildren were baptized here and were all members of the youth group. We held my husband’s funeral here and his ashes are in the rose garden right outside the church door. This church is my family. I believe what this church stands for. I love this church. I want it to be a blessing to the people of this village for another century. And now you ask me will I consider giving this money? My head says be careful, you might need that money, but my heart says go ahead.

Yes, I’ll consider it. I’ll do better than that. You know, pastor, you’re in luck today. It may surprise you to know that I have that much money, but I do. And I’ll be delighted to give what you ask. Something lavish for the glory of God while I’m still here to give it.

Relationships. Roots. Heart.

Giving is one of the high callings and privileges of church membership. How much is the work of God in this place, how much is sharing the seasons of life with these good people worth to you?

Amen.

Anatomy of a Decision

Dale Arthur Johnson (1936-2014), emeritus professor of church history at Vanderbilt Divinity School, died August 10, 2014 in Nashville after a long struggle with lymphoma and colon cancer. I knew Dale first as a teacher, dissertation advisor and housemate in Oxford during a period of sabbatical research for him and of dissertation research for me. After I emerged from Vanderbilt’s graduate program in 1987, Dale remained an interested and welcoming colleague and friend. This, my first venturing on what I anticipate may be a number of reflections about this good man and his influence concerns my initial encounter with him in the pages of the 1975 edition of the Vanderbilt Divinity School catalog.

The course of a life can turn on small incidents. Funny that I never told him about this. But seeing the photograph of Professor Dale A. Johnson in the Vanderbilt Divinity School catalog in the summer of 1975 triggered the internal motion that resulted in my enrollment at VDS later that same summer.

To be sure, other factors contributed to this choice. Encouraged by a Church of Christ mentor in whom I had developed an uncritical trust, I had cobbled together a complicated arrangement for funding my divinity school career abroad. It involved a group of Church of Christ congregations in Texas. I am pretty sure this “arrangement” had reality only in my own wishful dreamscape. Nothing was ever signed or even verbally agreed to. No memorandum of understanding between me and these congregations was ever drafted.

Amazingly, I had never even met the good people of the plains whom I nevertheless expected to make it possible for me and my young wife to travel to Scotland, where a bursary – the Scottish word for scholarship – was being held for me by New College, Edinburgh. There I would add to my stellar academic work labor as assistant to the previously mentioned mentor, a Church of Christ “missionary” from my home town in Texas who was being supported by churches in the States to persuade the working class Scots of Glasgow’s Castlemilk housing project to “obey the Gospel” and become members of the True Church. As Jack Paar would say, I kiddeth thou not.

That this ill-advised funding scheme fell through in mid-summer I regard now as great good fortune. But in the event I felt pressure to come up with plan B. At the eleventh hour – just two weeks before classes were to begin – Frank Gulley, then associate dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School, called to say that VDS wanted me as a student and could provide me with a partial scholarship that I could supplement with a job in the school’s work/study program.

I had applied to Vanderbilt Divinity School just before I got married in July, thinking it might be a good idea to have a backup plan in case the funding scheme for Scotland evaporated. It was just about the only prudential thing I managed to do that summer. A college professor I respected and admired – after four years toeing the ideological line at Abilene Christian College I was willing to say that about very few of my teachers – a teacher I admired who was a widely respected scholar of the Hebrew Bible had graduated from Vanderbilt’s Graduate Department of Religion with a Ph.D. When I encountered him one morning in the college bookstore, I asked him whether he would advise me to go to Vanderbilt Divinity School. Professor John T. Willis said yes, but added that I would need to be strong lest Vanderbilt cause me to lose my faith.

Hard upon Willis’s qualified endorsement, the scholarship offer from Dean Gulley was a major incentive. My parents had been clear that they would not provide financial support beyond my college graduation. At the time, this seemed reasonable enough. Besides, I was eager for the freedom and the challenges of being on my own in the world. Newly married at 22, I was – we were – now to sit on our own bottom financially. And we did. We both found jobs soon after unpacking our modest assemblage of belongings in a Nashville apartment.

Our friends Michael and Marceline had graduated, married and moved from Texas to Nashville earlier that same summer, both with intentions to go to Vanderbilt, he for divinity, she for law. It helped that college friends we knew and liked had already blazed a trail to the Athens of the South. We were callow, exuberant, curious and full of the sort of rebellious intellectual piss and vinegar that an upbringing in the Churches of Christ can create in some people. We drank a fair amount and tried exotic recipes on each other. Marceline smoked Gitanes, stopped shaving her armpits and discarded her bra. We went to foreign films at VU’s Sarratt Center and deconstructed them long into the night before turning our analytical prowess to post-Watergate politics. We went together – to a drive-in, of all unlikely venues – to witness the first porn movie any of us had ever seen, which, as far as I can remember, was Debbie Does Dallas.

But the photograph was before all that. Before John Willis’s endorsement, before the scholarship offer and before Michael and Marceline had moved to Nashville ahead of us, a 22-year-old with dreams of academic adventure (and maybe even glory) sat in the Abilene Christian College library thumbing through the faculty section of Vanderbilt’s divinity school catalog. And there was the fateful image, an unremarkable sidewise profile of Dale A. Johnson, B.A., M.A., Oxon. in the classroom.

My response to that photo and the copy paired with it was not irrational, but it was, I think, nonrational, intuitive and emotional. I did not make lists of pros and cons, using deductive reasoning to arrive at a conclusion about the best American seminary or divinity school for me. Prior to my enrollment, I had never visited Vanderbilt, nor, except for John Willis, had I ever known anyone who had graduated from the place. No, simply put, I saw the photo and the Latin abbreviation Oxon. – Oxoniensis, “of Oxford” – and knew that Vanderbilt was the place I wanted. Since I couldn’t have an Edinburgh University education, I later rationalized, I would go one better. I’d place myself under the tutelage of this young, earnest Vanderbilt professor who taught the religious history of modern Europe, America and nineteenth-century England and was Oxoniensis.

I resolved that Dale Johnson was going to become my ideal academic, my new hero.

A Very Small Thing

[The Great G Minor Symphony, No. 40, by Mozart] was written in the final years of Mozart's life, when things were not going well. An infant daughter had died a few weeks earlier, he had moved into a cheaper apartment, and he was begging friends and acquaintances for loans. But in the summer of 1788, he wrote his last three symphonies: Symphony Number 39 in E-Flat, Symphony in G Minor, and the Jupiter symphony. It is not known for sure whether Mozart ever heard any of these symphonies performed.

                            The Writer’s Almanac for July 25, 2014

I sat with my sponsor for ordination, T. Hartley Hall IV, at a table in the church hall of First Presbyterian Church, Nashville and listened to the Rev. Fred P. Zitzmann tell me that he didn’t think I was called to ministry. I have asked myself from time to time in the more than 35 years since whether he was right.

In my tradition of faith, people never tire of explaining the nature of a call to ministry. A call, the boilerplate explanation goes, is composed of three parts:  personal conviction, the possession of the requisite gifts and aptitudes and, finally, the confirmation of the community of faith as represented by members of a presbytery committee. On that day many years ago, Fred was saying to me and Hartley that, as a member of the presbytery committee with the power to say yea or nay, he was reluctant to concede the third part.

Like most terms and phrases the church uses when it presumes to describe the ways of God with human beings, call, calling or vocation is a notoriously ambiguous and politically malleable idea. Eventually, the Presbytery of Middle Tennessee formally confirmed that I had a call. When I think of it now in retrospect, this seems like no big whoop, but then it seemed to represent the validation of my whole life. The bureaucratic way was finally clear for the Presbytery of Western Kentucky to ordain me to the ministry of word and sacrament, and so it did on Friday evening, July 25, 1980 at First Presbyterian Church of Auburn, Kentucky. For those who mark such things, July 25 is the feast of St. James on the church calendar. Hartley preached the sermon that evening from the First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, chapter four.

With me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. I do not even judge myself. I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me. Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart.

Just so.

Saying what a calling or vocation is not is easier than saying what it is.  It is not a successful career in the church or anywhere else.  It is not being paid well or, more often, poorly for performing certain services. It is not identifiable by clothing or uniform or social status or public opinion or whether one summers in Maine, Montreat or Kanuga.  It is not measurable according to any list of goals and objectives that can, at the end of a funding term, be ticked off as completed in the final report to an imagined cosmic grant maker.

What is it, then? Having a call implies a certain awareness of a caller, an inchoate sense of that caller’s summons and a feeling of being haunted by some mysterious sense of accountability when one does not respond to that summons.

A calling is not, I say, an experience for any institution to define or own or evaluate. It is more commonplace than religious people would have you believe. It is simply finding – giving in and allowing oneself to be guided to – and doing the thing or combination of things that a person enjoys, is suited for or can’t not do. Just as Mozart found and did musical composition, Hemingway found and did the writing of stories or my friend Sandy Lynch found and does the building, repair and maintenance of anything heavy, wet or broken.

So Fred, wherever you are, my memory of your pious pronouncement on me still stings a bit, and reminds me that it is not for you or anyone else to pass judgment. On this anniversary, it's only for me to ask whether I'm still listening. Just in case I get a call.