Touching the Holy and Holy Touch

The Importance of Human Touch in Ministry

A sermon preached in St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 8), June 28, 2009.

Mark 5:21-43

Madeleine L’Engle, author and theologian, once said that evil is great good gone awry. Good things have a way of getting twisted. Many times human beings start out with a good idea that we turn into a good reality and proceed to make the reality into a system. First news you know, the good idea has become infected with systemic blight. Education systems, health care systems, welfare systems, economic systems, legal systems, and religious systems are just a few of those we can readily point to as having started out as good ideas and have ended up corrupted to one degree or another.

Holiness is such an idea. It has its roots in a primal human experience which we could call awe. Human beings encounter aspects of nature or dimensions of interpersonal relationships and sometimes, without any warning, we strike a vein of profound mystery. It shakes us to the core. Sometimes we are wounded, sometimes we are healed. Sometimes we are crazy with fear, sometimes we sink into unsurpassed peace. Out of such primal experiences we encounter a Reality far above and beyond us, too big for our imaginations, and certainly too great for us to control. Although it might look a little primitive to us on some days, on other days we can see clearly that ancient human beings responded appropriately to these experiences of transcendence with respect, reverence, awe, and even fear. Such experiences led our ancestors to mark off certain things as too live to touch—like so many high voltage wires or third rails that simply were too powerful to play with. Sometimes those perilous things they observed as connected to disease or relationship-destroying behavior. So they began to compile lists of things that were taboo. Every culture has its taboos. Almost no taboo is universal, but no society is without its own.

The good idea of holiness and its corollary taboos developed into the holiness code in the Book of Leviticus. Jesus inherited that, as did his whole society. It would be highly incorrect to say that Jesus dismissed all ideas of holiness. Clearly he did not, as the Lord’s Prayer attests: “Hallowed [holy] be your Name.” Moral and spiritual holiness are distinct from ritual holiness, however. Two of the many taboos in place to protect ritual holiness were the taboo against having contact with a woman who was bleeding and the taboo against contact with a corpse. If you don’t understand the strength of those two taboos, there is little way that you can understand today’s gospel, in which both taboos figure.

You can imagine what is going on in the mind of this woman in Mark’s story. Not only is she sick; she has a condition that alienates her from the rest of society and taints her as ritually impure. Even menstruating women had to undergo purification. For her, however, there was no let-up, nor had there been for twelve years. By this time, no longer is she merely sick, she is bankrupt, having spent all her money on doctors who have not helped her. Sick and poor (did you ever here of that combination?), she has heard about Jesus. She comes, anonymously, untouchable as she is, desperate for healing. She reasons that if she only touches his clothes, she will be made well. It is easy to do, so many are crowding around him. She reaches out, touches him, feels in her body the hemorrhage stop, and quickly slinks into the throng. He stops. “Who touched me?” he asks. He has felt power leave him. He looks around. Perhaps he spots her, catches her eye. She knows she is caught. Trembling in fear, she comes, falls down before him, confesses the whole thing. Usually it is his touch that heals. This time it is her touch that has brought forth the healing power. It was an act of hope, trust, faith. And it worked. Her faith had made her well. Touching him, she was healed of her disease. He says so.

It has all been an interruption. Jesus is off to the house of Jairus, synagogue leader and father. His twelve-year-old daughter is sick and at the point of death. Jairus has come up, pleading, “Please, please, please, Master, please come and lay your hand on her. I know that if you do she can make it.” By the time the nameless woman has intruded herself into his journey, what takes only a minute or two in the story is long enough in reality for Jairus’ little girl to die and for messengers to come announcing the sad news to him.

“Why trouble the rabbi any further?” There is a world of difference between a sick body and a corpse. Not only from the point of view of Jairus and any others who loved her, but from the point of view of the holiness code. Don’t you dare touch a dead body, else you will be contaminated. And until you are ritually cleansed you will be as a corpse yourself, an alien to your community, untouchable. Jesus tells Jairus not to fear, only to believe. When he arrives at the house, the mourners have started the funeral rites. Perhaps defensive and embarrassed at what seems like his silly remark—she is not dead, only sleeping—they laugh. Nuts! He puts them all outside, takes his in circle with him along with Jairus and his wife. He touches the untouchable corpse and says, “Talitha, cum.” “Little girl, get up.” She breathes again! She gets up, walks. He tells them to give her some food.

Ministry is about reaching across boundaries and chasms and touching. Sometimes it is literal. Sometimes it is metaphorical. But if we get nothing else from the stories of Jesus in the gospels, we are bound to see that he paid no attention to all the prohibitions that the holiness code set up, largely erecting barriers to keep people from polluting the religious cult. He cared enormously about ethical decisions, and profoundly about spiritual holiness. In Matthew’s gospel he enjoins his followers to participate in the very life of God by being all goodness, all righteousness. But if it is a matter of keeping the Sabbath instead of healing; if it is a decision between eating corn or going hungry; if it is a matter of observing the purity regulations or healing a leper; if it is a matter of steering clear of a corpse or raising an only daughter to life; if it is a matter of reprimanding a ritually isolated woman for “stealing” his power or confirming her healing, there is no issue for Jesus. Down come the barriers as he reaches across them. To him, nobody is untouchable. And no regulation takes priority over human need.
It is not the things which go into the body that defile a person, he says in one place. It is rather the things—the words, the behaviors, the acts—that come out of the heart of a person that defile.

For some time now I have been thinking with you about ministry, looking at the scripture through the lens of ministry. Jesus’ example teaches us something of singular importance about ministry: you can’t do much of it without touch. And you surely can’t do ministry if your notions about holiness are all mixed up. Because ministry, which in a real way is the expression of God’s holiness in the sphere of human activity and relationships, creates and restores community. We can never subordinate it to ritual purity. To do so is to take a great good and make it just the opposite. For nothing is further from the Reign of God than the depreciation of God’s children, or for that matter, anything that God has made.

Do we need even to point out that the very regulations that Jesus ignores in the holiness code are frequently those things that religious people pull out to cause or to extend alienation among people? You have eaten the wrong kind of food, taken the wrong kind of lover, had the wrong kind of sex, worn the wrong kind of clothes, gotten yourself tattooed or pierced, looked at the wrong things or read the wrong books, they shake fingers and warn. But you will never hear him saying any of that, as strong as some of his denunciations can be.

Ministry is about reaching out and touching. It is laying a hand on bread and blessing it to be the Body of Messiah. It is laying a hand on wine and touching the cup to be as his blood. And it is about taking the bread and wine into one’s own person and being transformed into the one whose body and blood it is. Ministry is laying hands on the sick and praying for the power of the Holy Spirit to possess them and heal them. It is about washing those who come to Christ in the laver of baptism and touching them with the cross of his death and resurrection. There is little place in Christian practice for stinginess with touch, though there is a large place in Christian practice for ensuring that that touch always be loving and respectful. We at least touch hands at the time of the Peace. Lovers take each other by the hand in holy matrimony, and give each other their bodies as the sacramental meeting place of human flesh and divine reality.

A young priest once went to his first parish, located somewhere near the Bowery in New York City. On his first night in the parish’s shelter for the homeless drunks, he found himself disgusted, sick with the filth of the guests. Nervously he fidgeted with the buttons taking off the shirt of a man who had thrown up all over himself. A presence beside him whispered. “Let me help you. Don’t be afraid to touch,” counseled his mentor. “That’s how they know we care.”

When Abraham took little Isaac to the foggy land of Moriah to be sacrificed, how did he take him? By the hand. And when he found that God wanted life, not sacrifice, and he brought his living son back down the mountain, how did he take him? By the other hand. Touch. In the realm of God, there are no untouchables. In Messiah’s ministry, nothing can separate us from the love of God. And whenever something threatens to, that is the very moment that an unseen but sure Presence takes us by the hand. Or, at the very least, we can reach out our hands believing that if we could only brush his garment, we would be as good as new.


© Frank G. Dunn, 2009.

Not So Fast in Dispensing With Doctrine!

Theology and Ministry

A sermon preached in St. Stephen and The Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, Trinity Sunday, June 7, 2009

Anglican Christians, generally speaking, are not stirred by doctrine as much as we are by worship. Sometimes we are accused of not even having any doctrines. I hope that by the time we have finished with the liturgy today you will know better. Today is the one day in the whole year that we focus on a doctrine. We call this Sunday “Trinity Sunday,” falling always a week after Pentecost Day. But we have no other feasts—not officially, at any rate—that celebrate doctrines or teachings.

When we do focus on the Trinity, it is sometimes not in the most helpful way. I don’t even want to count the number of sermons I have heard on Trinity Sunday that either lamely try to explain the Trinity or that declare exasperation with the complexity of Trinity. Today, I want to draw back a step or two and look with you at the issue of why having a theology is important to ministry.

As I continue to look with you at ministry as fundamentally the way we live our lives in the light of God’s Truth, offering all that we are and do to God for the sake of Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit, I am struck by the way theology shapes action and behavior. You may think you don’t know what theology is, and you may be convinced that you not only don’t own one or even care to. But trust me: theology is the, or a, or your “word about God,” your understanding of God, whatever that is. Even if you aren’t too sure about God, your very uncertainty impacts (and not necessarily negatively) your actions and behavior. Even the atheist has a kind of a-theology—an understanding of the God not to be believed in.

Theology is essentially a story. Whether or not it is a good story depends partly on how well it is told, and partly on the storyteller. Limiting the focus just to Christian theology, we can survey the field and fairly readily see that there have been (and are) some pretty awful theologies floating around. For example, there are all the theologies that see God as essentially at war with creation. Matter is opposed to spirit. Therefore do not trust anything material. Very strange. Then there are theologies that emphasize the afterlife to the point that everything is judged by whether or not a belief or action will help or hurt your chances of getting into heaven. And there are other theologies that only take the positive aspects of existence into account, without dealing with negative, dark, shadow-side of reality. These are just three possibilities out of dozens of really bad theological possibilities.

What difference does any of this make? Let me illustrate with a couple of cases. Suppose, let us say, that you have a theology in which you view the human race as the central feature of the natural world. God, you might think, really created the world principally for the enjoyment of the human race. It has no intrinsic value. Such a theology acts not only to validate, but to encourage the destruction of the natural world. Climate change is of no importance, except as a matter of concern and convenience for the human species. Other species can live or die. God is uninvolved and unconcerned. God, rather, is concerned only about narrow choices of personal morality. Now, almost no one really believes that hook, line, and sinker. But you can readily see that, if a person or group tells such a story consistently, they come out at a very different place from the person or group that holds a theology which sees humans as being accountable to God for the way they tend to the natural world.

Take another example. If your conception of God is that of a being that metes out judgment according to strict standards, it is quite likely that you will develop a theology that creates not a little anxiety about how well a person measures up to God’s standards. If “heaven” is contingent on meeting those standards, the thrust of that theology is likely to inspire behavior in accordance with God’s perceived will. If, on the other hand, your understanding is that God’s judgment has already been issued and that humanity has already been saved, clearly what motivates you to behave ethically is not your struggle to achieve an afterlife in heaven, but rather thanksgiving for what God has already given you.

So, if theology is important, what kind of theology is actually helpful? In a word, a Trinitarian theology. And what is that? It is an understanding of God that holds three important dynamics in equilibrium. One is the notion of God as a supremely transcendent Being, at the core of the universe, the creator of all. The second is the experience that God has been revealed most thoroughly in the person and work of Jesus of Nazareth. The third is that God is present and active here and now in all people, but especially in the community of faith centered in Jesus. We traditionally speak of the Trinity as one God in three persons. Although the language is not necessarily orthodox, I would suggest that we can get at the central idea by speaking of God as the Truth manifesting itself in at least three distinct but interdependent ways. God is transcendent. God is also revealed in human life, especially in that of Jesus. And God is accessible and real in the present. To emphasize any one of these things over the other two is to create a story that inevitably leads to a lop-sided theology that is apt to produce or at least encourage lop-sided behavior.

What would it look like if we were to have a Trinitarian theology undergirding our ministries? First, we would likely live with the understanding that not all truth can be squeezed into rational categories. We would hold that God is greater than any of us. We would accept the fact that there is a “givenness” to the universe: limitations and laws and even the irrational are part and parcel of the reality we live in and live with. Life is not all about human beings. We are a part of creation, certainly not the only part, and dubiously the most important part, despite our powers and possibilities. We would see that there is an overarching Benevolence which spans all life.

We would begin to feel more comfortable with Jesus, realizing that, for Christians, Jesus is indeed what makes us unique. Rather than debating about whether Jesus is the only way to God (which is a poor way to spend time), we would see rather that, for us, Jesus is the connecting link between divinity and humanity, so much so that we say he fully embodies both. Divinity and humanity live together in him at peace and in harmony. We would see Jesus as our model, and that his life, death, resurrection and ascension form a story that is the pattern or our own stories. We would find ourselves living, breathing, eating, drinking Jesus, forming our minds and hearts in him, until we reflect his his life to the point that people would know him because they knew us.

And we would have a pneumatology, a doctrine of the Holy Spirit, which understands God as not only transcendent and other, not only as historically located in Jesus of Nazareth, but every bit as real and as present with us here and now. We would understand that God did not stop with Jesus, but continues to unfold Truth through us. We would reckon with the fact that Jesus said, “I have many things to say to you but you cannot bear them now. I will send to you the Spirit, who will guide you into all truth.” We would see ourselves caught up in an ongoing revelation in which our lives and our experiences became the vehicles through which God is discovered and known as Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit.

© Frank G. Dunn, 2009

Pastors Are Neither Who Nor What You May Think

Pastoral Ministry

A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, the Fourth Sunday of Easter, May 3, 2009

Few images have lasted longer in Christian experience than the image of the shepherd. One of the most common terms among Christians everywhere is the term “pastor,” which, of course, is from our Latin past the word that means shepherd. This is altogether very interesting, if you don’t happen to live in sheep country. I have told you before that I grew up on a hog farm and really never met a sheep till I was grown. Others here grew up in cattle country. If we were looking for metaphors that connected more immediately with daily life, shepherd would not cut it for many of us. Yet, though our images of shepherds and sheep be somewhat romantic and precious, still it is hard to see Our Blessed Lord pictured in stained glass as a cattle drover the way he often is depicted as a shepherd. And it would be thoroughly ahistorical to picture him doing anything with pigs besides driving a herd of them down a bank and into the Sea of Galilee.

Yes, our proto-shepherd is Jesus, connected by many of us to everybody’s favorite psalm (which people used to know by heart), the 23rd, “The Lord is my shepherd.” I don’t know that the “Shepherd’s Psalm” is the best place to learn about pastoral ministry, but it is certainly a starting place. You might notice, to begin with, that the voice of the psalmist (let’s call the psalmist “sheep,” for clarity’s sake) focuses on the relationship of shepherd and sheep. The shepherd is the only thing necessary for the sheep. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” is perhaps not the best translation, but it is arguably the most fortunate. In this world where our wants are continually stirred up by incessant advertising, it is radical to say that God is absolutely everything that we need. The Lord makes us lie down in green pastures, leads us beside still waters, restores our souls, leads us in the paths of righteousness and through the valley of the shadow of death. The shepherd comforts, feeds, and protects, and heals the sheep. What could the sheep possibly want or need beyond that? So the key to the pastoral relationship is a great defusing of want.

To come quickly to the point: is there any way that we can reasonably see that pastoral ministry as something that we all do? Or is it something that fundamentally only God does—or in Christian terms, only Jesus does? Is this the place where we run into a special need to designate some people in the community as “pastors” or shepherds, people that we then ordain and begin following? By now you know my own answer to this question. There is a sense in which God alone is the Shepherd of our souls, and the human embodiment of that shepherd is Jesus, the Good Shepherd, as he calls himself. And there is definitely a need for “some to be pastors and teachers,” St. Paul says in discussing the organization of the Christian community. But the pastoral ministry of the Body of Christ is something that all baptized Christians share in the care the we exercise for each other, and ultimately for our world.

If pastoral ministry is something that we all share, then that must mean that we need to see ourselves every bit as much as shepherd as sheep. Some would argue that the shepherd/sheep language is really archaic and not helpful at all in this regard, but I want to contend that it is neither outdated nor inappropriate. One of the great problems we have in this society is that we too readily identify as sheep. That is not always the case, but it certainly is a continuing theme. And little wonder. It is much easier to be led, to be dependent, to be uncritical, to let out an occasional bleat here and there but to accept nothing of responsibility for the journey, the meal, the healing, or the accountability for the pasture. When people are too sheepish, they ignore the bad judgment of their shepherds, and become complicit in things like torture, for example, and other behavior not uncommon among bad shepherds. Or they bleat and carry on a little, but let a bunch of banker-shepherds play games around who really owns the flock. You get my point—and yes, I know that not all bankers or elected officials are to be lumped together and labeled bad shepherds. The point is not to judge the shepherds but to try to knock some sense into the sheep. Take ownership of the pasture! Conduct, do not just follow! Be a pastor, not simply an agreeable follower.

Ha! That is not what we expect of “pastoral” ministry, is it? “Pastoral,” especially in the Church, has come to mean compliant, lenient, easy-going, non-demanding, non-confrontational, even wishy-washy. The situation is not helped much by the current fashion of seeing God as all or most of those things. But the pastor, the shepherd, is capable of being quite assertive, and indeed must know how to be. Shepherds have to do battle with coyotes and wolves, if they are to have much of a flock. Shepherds, it is true, carry a crook, the bent end of which is for pulling straying sheep out of trouble spots. But that crook has a sharp point at the other end so that sheep can be confronted and, if necessary, jabbed. The best pastors have a wide repertoire of skills to do those kinds of encouraging, challenging, reproving things. And the very best pastors have brains strong and nimble enough to know what to do when. And all good shepherds know how to discern what the sheep and their situation call for.

To exercise a pastoral ministry means that you be willing to see yourself as having some responsibility, a good deal of responsibility. But something is wrong with this picture if we think of leadership merely as being in charge. Quite obviously, not everyone can shepherd every flock every day under every circumstance. We have to have a kind of “shepherd cooperative,” if you will, each taking turns at doing pastoral things, but doing them in such a way that the flock holds together. This is the great challenge for the human species at this point in time. We went through a century (or a millennium or two or three) in which totalitarianism held sway over long periods of time over vast swaths of geography and peoples. Are we capable of sharing leadership in a way that avoids just a lot of chaotic competition between pastors?

What might help us to be better pastors, not just to each other in the Body of Christ, but in situations where we are dispersed throughout a larger and frequently indifferent society, is to recall three things that are at the heart of the art of shepherding. Those things are comforting, clarifying, and confronting. We need all three. And, if we are to be effective shepherds, we need to be able to supply all three, or at least know the one or two that we are best at supplying.

Some of you are great comforters in the best sense of the word. You are like Joan, an old friend of mine, whom Joe and I recently visited. Joan is a person on whose doorstep I know I could show up admitting that I had done the most heinous thing, and she would say, “Come in, dear, and have a cup of tea.” You are the pastors I would want to have near me when I am in trouble. You are the pastors I hope are there when I lay dying.

Others of you are smart clarifiers. You ask good questions. You think well and clearly. You probe. You test. You analyze and scrutinize. Those are great pastoral skills. Jim is a friend of mine whom I call up when I get into a situation that is often swamped by a morass of emotions which cries out for a dispassionate, thoughtful, non-reactive response. He can sometimes ask just the thing that I have not thought to ask myself. You are the pastors that help us figure out what to do. And you do it best when you keep pushing us to ask the hard questions ourselves, rather than dispensing advice or trying to fix things for others who need to fix things themselves.

Confronters have a special pastoral ministry. If you are a confronter, you are a person of courage. I hope you are also a person of courtesy, because confronting shepherds who disdain sheep can be awful. The prophet Nathan in the court of King David comes to mind as an effective confronter. He is able to speak the hard truth to David (“Thou art the man!”) without fearing the consequences. Confronters sometimes demonstrate, sometimes remonstrate, and often debate. The Church could use more of them, precisely because they are willing to say things that are unpopular. No matter what you think of him, Bishop John Shelby Spong is a confronter. He has confronted people, institutions, behavior, positions, and issues from racism to sexism to homophobia to anti-Semitism. Many people do not like confrontation, and not only shy away from confronting or being confronted, but from confronters themselves. No society is deeply invested in changing its shibboleths and taboos. All the more reason that we need pastors in our lives who are willing to speak the truth to us, come what may, cost what it will. The best confronters never let us forget that the ones they confront are the ones they love.

It is fine to be a sheep. In fact you will always be one, in some fashion or other. “We are the sheep of your pasture,” reads the 100th Psalm. But we are all called to be shepherds as well. Look at your gifts, your personality. Are you comforter, clarifier, confronter, or some combination of them? When we are lucky enough to have pastors that find their voices, the sheep will know and follow their leading, very likely becoming shepherds themselves (something only human sheep can do, by the way). And goodness and mercy might likely follow us all the days of our lives until we live in the house of a Great and Good Shepherd forever.

© Frank G. Dunn, 2009

Get Real. You Have Something to Say.

Apostolic Ministry

A sermon preached in St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, The Second Sunday of Easter, April 19, 2009

John 20:19-31

Most of the time the Scriptures we read on Sundays vary. There are a couple of Sundays, however, when we hear the same story year after year. This is one of them. Every year on the Second Sunday of Easter we hear the story of Thomas. Except that it is not the story of Thomas, exactly. It is the story of the Risen Lord’s encounter with his community. Because Thomas figures prominently in the story precisely because he was not in it to begin with, we tend to fix our attention on Thomas.

There is a reason why we read this story every year. It is John’s account of what we call Pentecost. Luke tells a story about how the Holy Spirit came to the disciples when they gathered at the Feast of Weeks, fifty days after the Resurrection. John, however, presents the Risen Lord recreating a community on the very day of his Resurrection. This story is of such importance that we need to hear it three times more often than other stories of the resurrection. We need to hear it and remember that at the heart of Easter is the new community that Jesus creates and sends into the world just as the Father sent him.

The other stories that we hear on this Sunday, however, are not invariably the same. Today the gospel is paired with two interesting stories. One is from the Book of Acts, telling us how for a time the Church in Jerusalem practiced a form of communism, sharing all resources voluntarily. The other is from the First Letter of John, accentuating the intimate connection between the fully incarnate and risen Lord and the forgiveness of sins. When we put all three of these together a picture of apostolic ministry and teaching emerges. Before we look at that picture, just run through your mind and see what images of apostle you are carrying. Saintly male figures in robes, worthy of stained glass? Beards, sandals? What about knives (Bartholomew), an upside-down cross (Peter), an x-shaped cross (Andrew), all instruments of exotic martyrdoms? I suspect that most of us don’t feel much intimate connection with the apostles as a group.

So, the picture that emerges: let’s look at it. First, the picture of disciples on the evening of what we call Easter Day, hovering in a room behind locked doors, out of fear. Into their midst comes Jesus. He speaks a word of Peace, the first account we have of the Peace being exchanged (or at least given) in the New Testament. Then he says, “As the Father sent me, so I send you.” And that is the making of an apostle. Up until now they have been disciples, followers and learners, attracted to their rabbi, Jesus, and attached to his teaching. But when Jesus sends them, they become apostles. That is what the word “apostle” means: one who is sent. “Αποστελλω,” I send, is the Greek equivalent of the Latin emitto. So an apostle is one who is sent out on a mission, and is therefore the same as an emissary, or, if you will, a missionary.

Notice, however, that the apostles don’t just jump up and run the minute that Jesus says, “I am sending you.” First, Jesus breathes on them. Just has Yahweh had breathed life into the nostrils of the proto-human, Adam, Jesus breathes on the disciples giving them the breath of New Life. He specifically gives them the authority to do what he has notoriously done: forgive sins. The point of this account is that apostles are filled with the Risen Life of Christ, which is synonymous with the Holy Spirit. They also have the power of the Risen Lord. They are connected with Jesus.

Thomas’ absence from the band when Jesus first comes is an important detail. But like all details in the Fourth Gospel, it has more to do with the message intended for the hearers (you and me) than it is about Thomas. Because we, too, are the ones who were not there when Jesus appeared, we, like Thomas, have the problem of responding to Jesus when we have no actual part in the appearance episode. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet who believe” is deliberately said for our sake. But we are not the only ones who weren’t there when Jesus appeared. I don’t have the complete list, but I am fairly certain that Paul was not there. And Paul, writing his letters in some cases decades later, begins them “Παυλος Αποστολος,” Paul, an apostle… Paul is able to call himself an apostle because he is convinced that his relationship with the Risen Lord is as real, as authentic, as valid, as palpable, as any relationship that any other apostle had. Furthermore, he considers himself “sent,” on a mission to the Gentiles. It is not certain, but fairly close to certain that there were others—Barnabas, Silas, for example—who were not privy to Jesus’ appearances but who became apostles just like the eleven.

Through our baptism, we are committed to remaining in the “apostles’ teaching and fellowship.” That means that we are apostles too. In fact, one of the reasons that our tradition lays such heavy emphasis on confirmation is that the bishop, as the successor to the apostles (and thus an apostle) lays hands on us not only confirming us but commissioning us as emissaries in the apostolic ministry. We are sent, and we go with “orders” to share our testimony, or story, of the Risen Lord and what he has done in our lives. Jesus has breathed his life into us, and we go in the strength of that breath to do what he has done. That is what it means to be an apostle.

So. You think you can do it? Do you want to? Or are you back where Thomas was on that first Easter evening? “Fine, folks, if you had the experience. But I just haven’t had it yet. Furthermore, I really don’t much believe you, and I don’t want to be made a fool of. Let me see some evidence before we get too strung out on this,” etc., etc. I want to compliment you if you are like Thomas, because whatever else Thomas is, he is real. I have a feeling (and legend tells us as much) that Thomas made a very good apostle not in spite of his hesitancy to believe but precisely because of it. He was authentic, and I imagine that his testimony was credible.

In this last week, the news has been full of a somewhat frumpy, plain, unemployed Scotswoman named Susan Boyle. Appearing on a show called “Britain᾽s Got Talent,” she shocked audience and judges when she opened her mouth and began to sing “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miserables. Susan Boyle said to a reporter this week that she was totally “gobsmacked” at the response from around the world to her voice. One of my friends misheard her and thought that he had said, “God-smacked.” What a lovely thought! A God-smacked woman with a song that stands the world on end. Partly it is because the world loves the sound of her voice, and finds the song she sang beautiful. But the greater part of it is that Susan Boyle is real, unmodified and unpackaged by media, just being who she is, singing her song as truly as anything. That is what apostles do. They are touched with the genius, filled with the Spirit of Jesus, simply holy spirit. And they sing for the world their song of love, testifying to its truth, delivering its message.


© Frank G. Dunn, 2009

Demasiado Grande

Tu ministerio empieza al sepulcro

Un sermon predicado en la Iglesia San Esteban Episcopal, Washington, DC, el día de Pascua, el 12 de abril 2009.

San Marcos 16:1-8

El evangelio según San Marcos es un milagro. Marco nos dice que los discípulos no entienden nunca de la enseñanza de Jesús. Entonces, no es posible decir que si Jesús estuviera aquí con nosotros, podríamos tener más sabiduría y cambiar las ideas. Marcos da una cuenta muy simple y clara sobre Jesús, para clarificar que Jesús sabía exactamente lo que hacía, aunque nadie lo entendía, sino los demonios, una extranjera con una hija difícil, y también el capitán romano al fin de la escena de la crucifixión. Tal vez Pedro, que in el medio de la historia proclamó a Jesús el Mesías, pero inmediatamente después, mostró que no entendió nada de lo que Jesús pensó en eso.

¡Gracias a Dios por San Marcos y su evangelio! Porqué contando la historia del arresto de Jesús, el dice claramente que todos los discípulos—todos los hombres en el grupo—lo huyeron. Pedro es el único discípulo que furtivamente volvió, en tiempo preciso para cumplir la previsión que el gallo no hubiese cantado dos veces antes de él había negado a Jesús tres veces. Marcos nos dice que un grupo de mujeres estaban allá a la cruz y miraban donde se puso el cuerpo de Jesús. Cuando es el momento para un acontecimiento de la resurrección, el da una cuenta en los sonidos de silencio. Solamente oímos las mujeres que están murmurando en el amanecer sobre quien puede remover la piedra grande, a fin de que entren en la tumba para ungir el cuerpo. Entran en la tumba. Encuentran a un joven vestido de blanco (llámenlo “angel” si quieres, pero Marcos no le llama eso). Ellas se están asustadas. No dicen nada. Solo el joven habla. “No se asusten,” les dice. “Ustedes buscan a Jesús el Nazareno, el crucificado, no está aquí, ha resucitado; pero éste es el lugar donde lo pusieron.”

Tal vez nosotros nos preguntamos la consecuencia de ese mensaje para las mujeres dolorosas. Marcos no lo explica. Pero continua el mensaje del joven: “Vayan a decir…” Pero ellas no fueron y no hicieron. Salieron la tumba, asustadas y asombradas, por el miedo que tenían. El fin del evangelio.

Después de un poco de tiempo, muchas personas no pusieron creer que eso era el fin que Marcos había planeado. Entonces, supusieron que se ha perdido una pagina del libro y decidieron añadirla. Prestaron un poco de material de aquí y allá u hicieron la capitula 16 más larga y menos creíble.

Si. Es el fin. Las mujeres encuentran a un mensajero, escuchan las noticias, y se van, que tienen demasiado de miedo para hablar. Sin embargo, los lectores saben que algo pasó. La aparición de Galilea que el mensajero había anunciado claramente ocurrió, sino la cuenta de la previsión ciertamente se habría reprimido. Pero, hay algo que se puede creer sobre un grupo de personas abrumadas de tristeza y miedo para decir nada. Las mujeres parecen como nosotros exactamente.


A muchas celebraciones de Pascua, se proclama que Jesús ha resucitado. Pero, ¿qué más? Quizás está bastante cantar las aleluyas, ser asegurado de la vida eterna y una resurrección personal, y dejar con un corazón de alegría que hay una posibilidad de nueva vida. Tengo la idea que la Iglesia hoy (y quiero decir tan liberalmente que te incluye, no me importa quién eres) está sin palabras, y está miedosa como las dos Marías y Salome esa mañana a la tumba. Escuchamos la proclamación. Tal vez porqué parece imposible, pero pienso que es probablemente que parece frecuentemente desconectado de nuestras vidas ordinarias que salimos sino saber lo que necesitamos hacer. Está demasiado.

Yo hice un pacto con ustedes hace unos meses para examinar las escrituras de la perspectiva de ministerio. Debo explicar. Decir de ministerio no es hablar mucha jerga de la iglesia sobre clérigos. Ministerio, en el vocabulario cristiano es el terma que usamos para significar todo que somos y todo que hicimos. Su ministerio incluye todas sus relaciones, todas sus esperanzas, todas sus fuerzas, su trabajo, sus risas, sus sueños, y también sus pecadas. Lo que hice su ministerio cristiano, si es cristiano, es que todas las cosas de su vida expriman el muerte y la vida de Jesús, y que tu glorificas a Dios que Jesús revele y que revele a Jesús. El propósito de todo ministerio en el nombre del Cristo es hacer lo que Jesús pasó su vida haciendo: conectar el mundo a Dios, y en el proceso, abrir al mundo a su verdad más profunda.

Eso es un reto muy grande. Unas personas tendrían muchas dudas y dirían, “No gracias. Tal vez debo investigar otra religión, y abandonar la causa de religión completamente.” Pero es exactamente este punto cuando el testimonio de Marcos sobre la resurrección nos encuentra. Escuchamos la proclamación y estamos confundidos. ¿Vaya y digan? ¿Qué decir? Si Marcos lo planeó o no, es el resulto que el fin extraño de su evangelio puede causar. Tenemos figurarlo, y nadie va hacerlo para nosotros, aún Jesús. Si se puede juntarnos con él a Galilea, por ejemplo, ¡tenemos empezar empacar!
La piedra grande que nos causa nuestra estar nerviosos en la madrugada ya no nos importa mucho. ¡Debemos irnos!

Marcos nos invita a cumplir la historia con nuestro ministerio. ¿Que es eso? Vamos a contestarlo en pocos minutos. Vamos a viajar a la fuente de baustimo, como nos acostumbramos en la iglesia San Esteban. La fuente, entre otras cosas, significa la tumba. El jueves santo en la noche, pusimos el cuerpo de Jesucristo, en la forma de pan y vino, en la fuente, diciendo gráficamente que la fuente y la tumba son iguales. Pero la tumba, al fin, es el lugar donde nuestro ministerio comienza, porqué es allá que el hogar de muerte está lleno con el agua de vida nueva. ¡Somos bautizados, crisitianos! Fuimos sepultados con Cristo en su muerte por bautismo, y por las aguas Dios nos ha levantado, nos ha resucitado con Cristo.

Ese ministerio, como la vida de Jesús, consiste en cinco cosas que prometemos muchas veces. Prometemos que continuaremos en comunidad uno con otro, en la fracción del pan y en las oraciones. Prometemos que proclamaremos por palabra y acción que Dios nos da perdón y no nos da condenación. Prometemos que daremos toda nuestra energía para cuidar a todas las personas lo mismo como a Cristo. Prometemos que no dejaremos antes de justicia y paz extienden a todo el mundo. No hay ministerio más que eso.

¿Que pasa cuando sales a la tumba hoy? ¿Las palabras se pararán en su boca? ¿Estará demasiado?

Polly era una amigo muy querida de mi. Era mi directora espiritual hace más o menos 25 años. Me dijo que una noche, unos años antes de conocer, estaba yendo en su carro del Connecticut a los Berkshires. Solo durante el tiempo largo, estaba rogando para muchas personas en su vida que le han pedido sus oraciones. Muchas cosas terribles estaban pasando con sus amigos, sufrimiento, tristeza, dolor, violencia, todos de un gran montaña de problemas. En sus oraciones, ella se dejó. Gritó en el silencio, “Dios, ¿porqué, porqué? ¿Porqué permites todo? ¡Es demasiado grande!” Ella dijo en el silencio que sigue, escuchó una voz—no voz humana, pero que lo parecía—diciendo, “Es mi intención que sea demasiado grande.”

Si nuestro ministerio no sea demasiado grande, nosotros podríamos desarrolar la fantasía de que podemos hacer todo por nosotros mismos. Podríamos salvar la tierra, terminar las guerras, sanar las enfermedades, porqué somos inteligentes y santos. Pero no. No somos nosotros mismos que servimos en este ministerio, pero el poder de Dios que vive, la presencia de Cristo en nosotros. No se preocupe. Habrá días, posible de esta semana, en los que se dirá, “Simplemente demasiado.” ¿Porqué tratar de eso? ¿Porqué intentarlo? Dios mio, soy solamente muy pequeño y el reto es tan grande. Cuando lo dices, recuerda la proclamación que escuchaste a la tumba. Su Señor ha resucitado. Y el mismo poder que le resucitó de entre los muertos, te dará la vida nueva también.

© Frank G. Dunn, 2009

Is It Just Too Much?

The Ministry That Begins in a Tomb

A sermon preached on Easter Day, April 12, 2009, in the Episcopal Church of St. Stephen and the Incarnation, Washington, DC.

Mark 16:1-8

One of the God’s best miracles is the Gospel according to Mark. Were it not for Mark, we would not know so well that the disciples of Jesus were a bunch who never got it, dispelling for all time the notion that “if Jesus were only here” people would somehow have access to deeper insight and might actually change their minds. Mark tells a no-frills story about Jesus, making clear that he knew what he was doing but that nobody else actually did, with the possible exception of the demons, a gentile woman with a problem daughter, and a Roman centurion at the end of the crucifixion scene. Allowance can be made for Peter, who mid-way the gospel proclaims Jesus as the Messiah, only to demonstrate in the next breath that he understood nothing about what that meant in Jesus’ mind.

Thank God for Mark! In telling the story about Jesus’ arrest, he says flatly that all the disciples—the males, that is—deserted him and ran away. Peter is the only one who sneaked back, just in time to fulfill Jesus’ prediction that the cock would not crow twice before he had denied knowing Jesus three times. Mark tells us that a band of women stood by and watched the crucifixion from a distance, and were on hand to notice where the body of Jesus was placed. When times comes for him to tell the resurrection story, he does not pull out the trumpets, like Matthew, or the violins, like Luke, or the camera like John (I say that not to disparage, but to compliment the richness of the other three). Rather, Mark tells his story surrounded by an eerie silence. We only hear the women muttering in the early morning about who will roll the stone away, so that they can get into the tomb to perform the anointing of the body. They enter the tomb. They encounter a young man in a white robe (call him an angel if you will; Mark does not). Alarmed, they say nothing. The young man does the talking. “Do not be alarmed. You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him.”

We may well wonder what effect such a statement had on three grieving women. Mark does not go into that quite yet. He continues the messenger’s message: “But go, tell…” And that they did not do. They went out of the tomb, full of terror and awe. They said nothing to anyone because they were afraid. End of gospel.

After awhile people simply could not believe that that was the end that Mark really intended. So they decided that a page must have been lost from his book, requiring that they make up something to round the story off. And they borrowed some stuff from here and there and gave chapter 16 a bit more length and a lot less credibility.

So that is how it ends. Women encounter an angel, hear the news, and clear out, too scared to talk. Readers know, of course, that something happened. This Galilee appearance the messenger had announced must certainly have happened or the report of its prediction would surely have been whited out. Still, there is something immanently believable about a group of people too overwhelmed and scared to say anything. In that sense, the women are just like most of us.

If you are like me, you have been to a few Easter celebrations, and all of them have proclaimed that Christ is risen. But then what? Maybe it is enough to sing the alleluias, to be reassured of everlasting life and a personal resurrection, to come away with a gladdened heart that no matter how bad things get, there is always the possibility of new chances and new life. I have more than a feeling that the Church today (and I want to define that liberally enough to include you, whoever you are) is just about as speechless, as stymied, and frankly as scared as were the two Marys and Salome on that morning at the tomb. We hear the proclamation. Perhaps because it seems so unlikely, but I think maybe moreso because it frequently seems so disconnected from our workaday world, we turn to leave and simply don’t know what to say or do. It is just too much.

I made a pact with you some months ago to look at the scriptures from the perspective of ministry. I must explain. To talk of ministry is not to talk churchy talk about clergy. Ministry, in the Christian vocabulary, is the word we use to talk about everything we are and everything we do. Your ministry enwraps all your relationships, all your hopes, your efforts, your work, your laughter, your dreams, and even your sins. What makes your ministry Christian, if it is Christian, is that all the stuff in your life is in someway expressing the death and life of Jesus and glorifying the God whom he reveals and who reveals him. The point of all ministry in the Name of Christ is to do what Jesus spent his young and short life doing: bringing the world to God, and in the process, opening up the world to its deepest Truth.

That is a tall order, and one that not a few people right here would shake their heads at and say, “Wow. Maybe I better check out another religion, or maybe abandon religion entirely.” But it is exactly at this juncture that Mark’s resurrection story intersects with us. We hear the proclamation and we stand confounded. Go and tell? Tell what? Whether or not Mark intended it, that is exactly the effect that his gospel’s weird ending can have. We have to figure it out, and nobody is going to do it for us, including Jesus. If we are to meet him (in Galilee, for instance), we have to get a grip. We have a trip to make, and perhaps a hundred other things to do. In retrospect, the stone that we worried so about earlier in the day seems pitifully insignificant now. We ourselves have to get rolling!

Mark invites us to finish the story with our ministry. And what is that? We are going to answer that question in just a few minutes. We are going to make a pilgrimage to the baptismal font, as is our custom in St. Stephen’s. The font, among other things, symbolizes the tomb of Jesus. On Maundy Thursday night, we placed the Body of Jesus, in the form of Bread and Wine, in the font, saying graphically that font and tomb are one. But tomb turns out to be the place where our ministry begins, because it is there that what was the place of death becomes filled with the water of life. We are baptized, people! We have been buried with Christ in his death by our baptism, and through those waters God has raised us to a life united with our risen Lord’s!

That ministry, which is startlingly like Jesus’ life, consists in those five things that you and I keep promising over and over again. We promise that we will continue in community with each other, breaking bread and praying. We promise not if, but when, we fall away, we will repent and return. We promise that we will proclaim through what we say as well as what we do the Good News that God is about forgiveness, not damnation. We promise that we will spend our lives treating everyone as if even the dumbest and the worst were Christ himself. And we promise that we will not rest in the fight for justice and peace until the dignity of every human being (and I would add all creation) is assured. That’s it. There is no other ministry than that.

So what happens when you leave the tomb today? Will the words stick in your throat? Will it just be too much?

Polly Wiley was one of the dearest friends I ever had. She was my spiritual director about twenty-five years ago. She told me that one night, years before I knew her, she was driving the long and dark way up Route 7 in Connecticut to the Berkshires. Alone for several hours, she was praying for a host of people in her life who had asked her prayers. Some awful things we happening to some of them: intense suffering, grief, tragedy, all piled onto one another. In the middle of her prayers, she stopped. Gripping the steering wheel, she shouted out, “Why God, why? Why all this? Why do you let it happen? It is just too much, too much!” Polly said that in the silence that followed her outburst, she distinctly heard a voice—not a real human voice, but a voice as real as if it were—saying, “I mean it to be too much.”

Were it not too much, this ministry of ours, we should fall too swiftly for the fantasy that we could do it all ourselves. We could save the planet, stop the wars, end the suffering, cure the illness, all because we are just that smart and just that holy. But no. It is not we who live and work and do this ministry, but the power of God, the living Christ within us. Don’t worry. There will be days, probably even this week, when you will say, “It’s just too much.” Why bother? Why try? My God, I’m just so little and the task is so big. And when you do, remember the proclamation you have heard at the tomb. Your master is risen. And the selfsame power that raised him from the dead, raises you.

© Frank G. Dunn, 2009

Until We Laugh

A sermon preached Maundy Thursday, April 9, 2009, in the Episcopal Church of St. Stephen and the Incarnation, Washington, DC

John 13:1-17, 31b-35 Three-year-old Savannah cried every day she was in the parish day school. Sometimes she would wail. At other times she would whimper. Her incessant crying got worse when she would come to chapel.

Savannah was blind. Maybe because she could not see, the strangeness of school frightened her. Or maybe her emotional problems had nothing to do with her blindness. For the priest, leading a chapel service with Savannah in it was challenging. Her moaning seemed to be a poignant commentary on the emptiness of words.

Maundy Thursday came. The day school director asked me if I would come and explain to the children about Maundy Thursday. “Let’s do a foot-washing,” I suggested. I gathered the children around. “Jesus looked for a way to show his friends how much he cared for them,” I began. Savannah began to cry. “The people where Jesus lived had a way of showing their guests respect. When people would visit them, generally a servant would take off their sandals and wash their dusty feet.”

“Jesus wants to wash your feet,” I said as I poured water into a basin. “He wants to show you how much he loves you. He wants you and me to understand that there is nothing better or more important to do than to love one another as he loves us. And as a sign of that, he wants to wash our feet, as if he were a servant whose only job was to do that.”

I had no idea how children would react to foot-washing. Would it seem silly? Invasive? Too strange? One by one they took off their shoes and socks. They all held their feet over the basin. I poured warm water over their feet, washed and dried each one. Some giggled a bit. Most were mesmerized. “Remember to love everyone as Jesus loves you,” I said as I washed each little foot. A few hung back. The room grew quiet, but for the sounds of water washing, the clink of my ring on the side of the pan.

A teacher held Savannah, who was strangely silent, but for a little sniffling. She bent down, holding Savannah’s bare foot over the basin. I poured water. “Savannah, remember…” Savannah let out a little giggle. And another. Then she threw her head back and laughed deeply. “Again,” she said. I poured more water, pressed her foot between my palms. She laughed and laughed. Then another couple of children picked up the laughter, and like a blaze it spread across faces and foreheads till the whole room was laughing with Savannah.

The water of life runs over fearful hearts and stony, runs down the cracks and crevices and gets to places that nothing else can reach. Teary places, scary places where no light ever comes. Lord, do not wash only my feet, but my hands and my head and my heart and my soul and all the places where I hide from the truth and all the places where I keep my bad dreams. Wash me through and through in the places where my secrets weigh me down. Wash away my sins, but wash away my fears as well. Let me feel you holding my feet, even when I cannot see you. Wash me, Lord, wash me, until I laugh again.

© Frank G. Dunn, 2009

Hasta Que La Risa

Sermón para Jueves Santo, predicado en la iglesia de San Esteban y La Encarnación, Washington, DC, el 9 de abril 2009

San Juan 13:1-17, 31b-35

Savannah era niña que tenía tres años. Todos los días lloró a la escuela para niños de la parroquia. A veces gemía. A veces lloriqueó. Su llanto incesante empeoró cuando venía a los servicios en la capilla de la escuela.

Savannah era ciega. Tal vez porque no podía ver, la extrañeza de la escuela la asustó. O tal vez ser ciega no fue la causa de sus problemas emocionales. Para el cura, la dirección de un servicio en la capilla cuando Savannah estaba allá era difícil. Su lloriquear parecía un comentario muy penoso sobre palabras vacías.

Jueves Santo ocurió. La directora de la escuela me pidió venir y explicar a los niños la significación de Jueves Santo. “Que lavemos los pies,” le sugerí. Cogí a los niños. “Jesús esataba buscando una manera para mostrar a sus amigos cuanto se preocupaba para ellos,” yo empecé. Savannah comenzó llorar. “La gente que vivía en el país de Jesús tenían un costumbre para mostrar respeto a sus huéspedes. Cuando personas les visitaban, un siervo tendría sus sandalias y lavaba sus pies polvorientos.”

“Jesús quiere lavar sus pies,” yo dije mientras vertiendo agua en una palangana. “El quiere mostrarles tan mucho los ama. El desea que entendamos que no hay nada más importante que amar a los demás como él nos ama. Como un símbolo de eso, quiere lavar nuestros pies, como fuera un siervo de quien el único trabajo era hacer eso.”

Yo no tenía la menor idea de cómo los niños reaccionarían al lavado de los pies. ¿Le parecería una tonteria? ¿Invasivo? ¿Demasiado extraño? Uno por uno se quitó los zapatos y los calcetines. Cada niño puso sus pies sobre la palangana. Vertí agua tibia sobre sus pies, los lavé y sequé. Algunos se reieron. La mayoría estaban cautivada. “Recuerde a cuidar a todos como Jesús te ama,” yo dije como lavaba cada pie pequeño. Algunos dudaron. La capilla creció tranquila, a excepción de los sonidos del agua de lavado, el tintineo de mi anillo en el lado de la sartén.

Una maestra tuvo a Savannah, que estaba tranquila extrañamente sino un poco de lloriquear. La maestra dobló hacía abajo, y puso el pie de Savannah sobre el cuenco. Vertí agua. “Savannah, recuerde…” Savannah comenzó a reirse un poco. Luego, se rió más. Ella tiró su cabeza hacía atrás y se rió profundamente. “¡Otra vez!” me dijo. Vertí más agua, apreté su pie entre mis palmas. Ella se rió más y más. Luego, otros niños empezaron reirse, y como un fuego, rapidamente las risas se extendieron sobres los rostros hasta todos en la sala se estában reyendo con Savannah.

El agua de vida desciende sobre corazones temerosos y pedregosos, desciende en las fisuras y grietas y corre hacía abajo a los espacios donde no se puede llegar nada más. Lugares de lagrimas, lugares de miedo donde la luz no viene jamás. Señor, lávame no solo los pies, sino también las manos y la cabeza y mi alma y mi corazón y todos los lugares donde me oculto de la Verdad y en todos los lugares donde guardo mis sueños malos. Lávame completamente en los espacios donde mis secretos me pesan mucho. Purifícame de mis pecados, pero quitame de mis timores también. Dejame sentir que tu tienes mis pies, aun cuando no puedo verte. Lavame, Señor, lavame, y dejame reirme otra vez.


© Frank G. Dunn, 2009

The Moment You Have Been Waiting For

Ministry and Evangelism

A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, March 29, 2009

Text: John 12:20-33

You have just heard what has to be one of the most confusing passages in all the New Testament. On days like this I sometimes think we should change the response to the gospel reading to something like, “Praise to you, Lord Christ, we think.”

Some Greeks are attending the Passover in Jerusalem. It is clear that they are not just Greek-speaking Jews but are in fact Gentiles, most likely converts to Judaism. They ask Philip, who happens to have a Greek name and to come from a generally Greek-speaking area of Galilee, to speak with Jesus. For whatever reason, Philip goes to Andrew, the other disciple with a Greek name. Andrew then does what he is frequently pictured in the gospel narratives as doing: he brings people to Jesus, along with Philip with whom he frequently works as a team.

The careful reader of John’s gospel will have noticed that for the last several chapters, Jesus has been saying things that suggest a universal appeal of the Good News. He has sheep other than the fold of Israel who will hear his voice and come to him, so that there will be one flock, one shepherd, for instance. The arrival of the Greeks, who come looking for him, marks a climactic moment. Their very coming is so important that the gospel writer leaves them standing there as he delves into the meaning of their arrival. Like Nicodemus in Chapter 3, the Greeks are left to drift off the pages of the gospel without the benefit of a conclusion to the narrative that brings them there.

The other gospels deal with the arrival of the gentiles in different ways. Matthew tells the story of the Magi, thus presenting the gentiles as having been among the first beyond the holy family itself to recognize the true identity of Jesus. Mark tells his story in such a way as to reveal the gradual dawning upon Jesus himself of the mission to the gentiles, presenting as a climactic moment the appearance of a Syrophonœcian woman (another Greek-speaking gentile) who seems to have caused a kind of epiphany for Jesus, not just an epiphany of Jesus. Luke writes the most gentile-directed gospel of all, and overtly places the notion of a gentile mission in the birth narratives by having the aged Simeon at his presentation in the temple refer to him as “a light to enlighten the gentiles.” So this is the way John handles the idea, by telling an account of how, in his narrative, the first gentiles come to Jesus.

The point is that what distinguishes Jesus’ ministry more than any other single thing is that it blasts open the wall that separates Israel from the rest of the world, and brings to the table of Abraham all those who were formerly left out. And, speaking of Abraham, this very notion is embedded in the Covenant with Abraham, where the promise of God is to furnish descendants of Abraham as numerous as the sand on the seashore or the stars in the heavens. Isaiah picks up the theme by saying that the vocation of Israel is to be a light to the nations. Jesus fulfills these hopes and promises by willingly laying down his life by being lifted up on the cross so that he might draw the whole world to himself.

You may recall that I have bargained with you to look at Sundays’ scriptures through the lens of ministry. What does this passage have to do with ministry? What light does it shed on what you and I do as disciples of Jesus? In large part, the way we answer that will depend on how we read the story. Is the story, for example, about how we have been included? Perhaps. But consider another narrative. I once lived in an idyllic New England town. Its very name—“Newtown”—suggested an imaginary place that existed a bit outside the everyday world. It was not uncommon, I found when I moved there, for the topic of party conversations to be, “Don’t you just love Newtown?” People would frequently swap stories about how they were glad to have moved to Newtown, how much they liked—no, loved—it. But some of us noticed that there was an element in the “I love Newtown” story that went like this: “Now that I am here, I want to make sure that I am among the last to come here. Let’s do everything we can to keep the town from changing. And that means we need to limit who comes in.” I say all this publicly because it was no secret. During the thirteen years that I lived there, some of us, led by the churches, had to talk openly and persuasively about the kind of exclusionism that that attitude bred. In order to do ministry there, we had to prick the bubble of illusion that somehow we were without problems, without pain. And we had to work to dismantle the wall that separated Newtown from the “gentiles,” the others, who were unable to come in.

The single biggest reason that Jesus got nailed to the cross was his penchant for including the outsider, the other. And nothing is better attested about his ministry than that. Whether it was a teaching about a Samaritan, the healing of a woman who was ritually impure, a conversation with a morally questionable Samaritan woman, his open table fellowship with tax collectors and sinners, his ministry over and over crashed the presuppositions that folks behind the religious fences were safe from invasion. Whether he believed that from the start or whether, as Mark seems to suggest, he came to that position gradually, clearly by the end of his brief ministry it was clear: no one was excluded from the realm of God.

And nothing less can characterize and shape our ministry. Like Philip and Andrew, our job is to bring people to Jesus. For us, it is not just a matter of escorting a delegation to Jesus for an interview; it is bringing into his presence and community all people who show the slightest interest in being a part of it. And it is even moreso our responsibility to issue invitations to people to come meet Jesus by meeting his community, the Church.

I am going to assume that that point needs no further elaboration. But I think we do need to spell out what specifically it looks like when we practice a kind of hospitality and outreach that mirrors Jesus’ own ministry. First, there is nothing wrong or offensive about inviting folks to come with you to your community of faith. It all depends on how you do it. “I’d like you to join me this Friday for supper at our church,” is one way. “Would you like to come with us to St. Stephen’s?” is another. Second, respect the fact that the answer might well be no. Folks may wish to decline. And if you have ever been cornered by someone’s insistence that you do something you don’t want to do, you know how uncomfortable that can be. So leave plenty of room for someone to say no, thank you. Respect for boundaries is a basic tool of hospitality.

But what about a more pointed matter, sharing your faith? The courteous thing to do is to invite someone to share their faith—or lack of faith—before we start sharing ours. To begin with, we frequently find that someone who we might have thought didn’t have much faith actually has a good deal of it. And not uncommonly, our own faith is enriched by someone else’s. I try to make it a point to ask questions rather than make statements. “What gives you strength?” “What do you value most?” It is not surprising that when we practice asking questions, we usually inspire others to ask them too. And when someone asks you a question, that is your entrée, their invitation to share your faith. What does give you strength? What is important to you? Where do you go to look for meaning?

You might well be wondering what all this has to do with what Jesus says at this climactic moment when the Greeks come seeking him. I don’t know that his parable about the seed falling into the earth and dying so that it can produce much fruit has much to say about expanding the boundaries of the community of faith. But there is something about his response that addresses our reluctance to do the ministry of evangelism (did you know that is what we have been talking about?) or anything else that might seem hard or off-putting. Jesus lets us know that nothing of worth happens without considerable risk. “A little of us has to die in order to grow again,” says El Gallo in The Fantasticks. And it is true. The only way we will ever follow Jesus is by letting go of our fears and preconceptions, and by daring to follow the example of his authenticity.

Don’t be surprised, when you find yourself doing that, if you have the strange sensation that “the hour has come.” It might be that you begin to taste what it is like to be doing what your were created to do, and finding an unutterable beauty and freedom in doing it.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2009

Things Are the Opposite Of What You Think

Ego, Self, and Ministry: An Explosive Possibility

A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, March 8, 2009

Mark 8:31-38

If we were to make a list of gospel passages that we might wish had never been said, the passage from the gospel today might well lead all others. “If any would come after me, let them deny themselves, take up their cross and follow me.” Doesn’t this trouble you?

You might be just vaguely aware that there are hosts of people who nurse their victimhood because they think that in doing so they are behaving the way Christ wants them to. Think of the woman whose alcoholic husband beats her and verbally trashes her, who, fearing for her life, takes refuge in the belief that by staying in her marriage she is doing the will of Jesus, just carrying her cross, just carrying her cross. Or think of the hosts of men and women through the centuries who have tried to lower their sense of self-importance by wearing hairshirts, flagellating the skin off their backs, sitting atop pillars for years, starving themselves nearly to death, cutting off body parts, all manner of things. You don’t know anybody like that? Well, believe me, those are live examples, and not all of them in the distant past.

Generally, the harder the saying the more trustworthy its authenticity. So this one must really be authentic! Jesus seems to have been utterly serious. Somehow he had gotten the notion that his vocation involved suffering and denying a shameful death. Peter pulled him aside and argued, “Master! You can’t talk this way. This is no speech for a Messiah to be giving. You’ve got bullies to beat, enemies to conquer, kingdoms to set up, justice to meet out. What’s all this nonsense about suffering and dying? Don’t you think your followers are owed a little consideration? Keep on talking this way, and you’ll do in your own movement.”

And Jesus responds, “You’re thinking the typical human way, Peter—er, Satan—you and that tempting tongue of yours.” (Or words to that effect.) And then he gives us, in the middle of this hard saying, a clue as to what he really is talking about. “Not the way God thinks…,” he adds. There is another way of thinking about these matters. And, frankly, it is a way that isn’t too familiar to the average, virtually unconscious human.

So much of the gospel message depends for a right hearing on how carefully and accurately we understand a couple of basic things. One of those things, which this passage itself defines and illuminates, is that things are not always what they seem. Take death, for instance. Everything that appears to be death is not death, nor is death itself a bad thing. In fact, death is a part of the created order and thank God it is. But, ironically, the very things human beings do to insulate themselves from death frequently only create an illusion that death can be managed or banished. Some of those things, like accumulating power, amassing fortunes, protecting security, and extending life expectancy, look to be life-giving, but in fact are not. They are quite often parts of the program to which Jesus referred when he said, “those who would save their lives will lose them.” Or you can take life, for another instance. Everything that appears to be life is not life.
Sometimes life is lost by those who invest most deeply in the things that are easily identified with the very best things possible: good looks, great intelligence, lots of money, plenty of things. And Jesus is by no means alone in saying that “those who lose their life for my sake and the gospel’s will find it.” For all religious traditions, in one way or another, point to the truth that there is a way to live that is not altogether obvious and which must be consciously sought and chosen.

A third instance of things not being exactly what they seem on the surface is the matter of self. While it is true that Jesus and the gospel writers do not share our preoccupation with “self,” which has come to be a major topic of investigation and discourse through the centuries, it is nonetheless true that at rock bottom, this passage is talking about two different ways of approaching one’s self. Mark uses the word that means “soul” to mean “life.” It is a word that you know: ψυχη or psyche. And, in the New Testament, it frequently means the whole living person, or “self,” if you will. Thanks to depth psychology, we have developed a way of differentiating between the “Self,” by which we mean the core reality of the human being, and the “ego,” which is the conscious, willing self, the “I” that we use to refer to ourselves. (See how tricky language gets?) Ego sometimes gets bad press in places like churches, and it is wrongly assumed that the ego is a bad thing. But the ego is a natural, normal part of us, and we need it to be strong. (If you want to see lots of weak egos, visit a mental hospital.) The problem is that the ego can sometimes get inflated out of all proportion. When that happens, ironically the ego becomes immobilized or ineffective. You can picture the hapless ego as the driver of a stagecoach, unable to control and restrain a team of wild horses, so powerful are the unconscious drives that direct and rule the person. With this in mind, we can take Jesus’ saying to mean: “Those would be my disciples must absolutely come to terms with their egos, and decide not to live an ego-driven life. Because all those things that inflated egos seek spell the death of real life. On the other hand, letting go of the ego and living out of a deeper, truer Self is precisely the way to Life. It involves taking up a cross, which is to say that it is difficult. You will identify with things that your ego would normally run from, like suffering in the cause of Truth, forgiving when all you want to do is keep on hating, and sacrificing for the sake of Justice. But, though you may well lose your life literally, you will in fact find what it is truly to live.”

So far, so good. We now are able to put Jesus’ saying into language that makes a little more sense than a notion that can be used to justify permanent victimhood. But you might remember that you and I are in the process of reading scripture like this from the point of view of what it has to say about ministry. This leads to a very interesting question: is there any such thing as ministry without ego? And, if so, why are great big egos sometimes drawn to ministry, which might look like a way to give up everything but frequently is not that at all? (And I am not talking about ordained ministry, by the way, but about the way we organize and live our whole lives in the service of Truth, with a passion for Justice, guided by Love.)

There is no such thing as egoless ministry. God redeems the ego right along with the rest of us. But if ministry—specifically being a disciple of Jesus—involves living from a different center, acting not from an inflated ego but from a deeper place, how? How do we do it?

We can take a number of approaches. Some will seek authorities—Church tradition, manuals of discipline, books such as The Purpose Driven Life or the old classic In His Steps or the even older classic The Imitation of Christ, celebrities of various kinds, philosophers. One of those authorities may become your guiding star. Others will insist on the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount of some other passage from the Bible. And that may work for you, too. I suggest a third alternative. Focus on a couple of basic practices that can keep you grounded.
The first of these might be to build into your life a regular practice of reflection. Some journal. Some meditate. Others pause and take stock daily in prayer. Others have a spiritual director whom they see periodically. All of these are examples of ways that one can practice being reflective. And why is that important? Because if we don’t stop and look at our lives somewhat objectively, chances are we will continue, like Peter, to think in purely human, ego-driven terms, never seeing the higher way nor hearing the deeper call. We’re apt to get stuck doing the things that our tribe or family or political alliances tell us we ought to do in order to be accepted, and as a result we will live somebody else’s life rather than our own, which we will surely lose.

Another way to ground yourself is to study Jesus’ life diligently, attentively, inquisitively, critically, honestly. You will, of course, ponder the gospels frequently. But also look at what St. Paul—who never knew him personally—has to say about life in Christ. That will lead you into places like Romans 8, in which he discusses “walking in the Spirit of Christ,” and Philippians, in which he describes what it is like to count everything else as so much trash in contrast to knowing and responding to the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. You might try styling your life along the lines of a list in St. Paul, where he enumerates the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. Most of those things are virtues, and you only acquire them by deliberate actions, such as random acts of kindness, or even planned acts of kindness. You and I both have known a lot of people who gained the whole world but never found the beauty of life, but I’ll bet that between us we can’t name one person who has diligently lived a life of kindness, patience, gentleness, and goodness who could tell us that they were so thoroughly disappointed because by doing all those things they had somehow missed out on life. No. Because those things are the abundant life which Jesus came to give us, and which he promises we will in fact find if we stop holding on to our fear of death, let it go, take up this strangely beautiful way of the cross, and follow him.

Sometimes, frankly, I understand those who always have something better to do than to go to church, those who find following Jesus a quaint idea that is quite silly in a world where there are so many other attractive options. I understand how some people are so beat up by churches and stupid hierarchies that they want no further part of anything vaguely Christian. I too find Buddhism attractive with its forthright dealing with suffering and its counsel to detach. I find the option of Judaism compelling with its warm conversations with the Master of the Universe. But when I look into my own heart I see sometimes a fear, not unlike that of John Donne, whose sin of fear was that when he had spun his last thread he would perish on the shore. This Dunn’s fear is that some day this body will cease to work for me, this body I have learned so hard, so late to love. What if, like my mother and her sister and others of my relatives I wind up crippled by a stroke, no longer able to run or walk or paint or write, maybe even like Jean-Dominique Bauby, my ψυχη, my life sealed in a frozen body, unable to communicate or even, like him, to dictate by winking my one working eye a whole book called the Diving Bell and the Butterfly? I fear losing life as I know it and I want to save it (don’t you?). And then I flip through the annals of Christ lovers and find the story of Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky. He was a Russian Jew who converted to Christianity, came to this country in the 1850’s, and wound up becoming a missionary to China and eventually Bishop of Shanghai. Facile in languages, he had taught himself Chinese on the voyage to the Orient. Translating the Bible into Wenli, he determined to carry on his work even after devastating paralysis caused him to resign his see. So for the rest of his life he pecked out on a typewriter (100 or more years ago) using the middle finger of his partially paralyzed hand over 2000 pages of text. Before he died, he said, “I have sat in this chair for twenty years. At first it seemed hard. But God knew best. He kept me for the work for which I am best fitted.”

All who would lose their life for my sake and the gospel’s will find it. Would you rather have it that way, or gain the whole world?

© Frank G. Dunn, 2009

Take a Moment to Reflect, and See What You See

Withdrawal and Action: The Rhythm of Ministry

A sermon preached in St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, March 1, 2009.

Mark 1:9-15

“And immediately the Spirit drove him out into the wilderness.”

No sooner had Jesus been baptized, Mark tells us, than the same Spirit which alighted on him pushed him right out of the Jordan and into the desert. I don’t know, but I suspect that if Jesus were telling us the story today he might say something like, “Deep down I knew that I had to get away, to spend time by myself, before I could even think about that urgent, compelling ministry I was about to begin. You can’t imagine how many things swimming around in my head and heart I had to sort out.”

Ministry is rhythm. As such, it resonates between polarities: action and contemplation, engagement and receptivity, work and rest, words and silence. That rhythm we reflect in the way we structure time. The oldest institution in our religion is the Sabbath, a day of rest and withdrawal standing in contrast to six days of labor. We build into the Church Year the season of Lent, which itself is a kind of Sabbath, bidding introspection and encourage stock-taking. Lent affords a change of pace from energetic celebrations and even a deepening of the hues of ordinary time that sometimes vacillates between blandness and frenzy.

In the last few decades, a fair number of voices have raised the issue of Sabbath time, including our own Tilden Edwards in a book by that title. Judging from the evidence, I would say that few of us have heard the message. Yes, we believe in vacations. We even see the value in things like meditation and retreats. But for the most part, we have not yet begun to think of ministry as something besides doing. We imagine that ministry is about meetings or demonstrations or serving meals or teaching Sunday school or running errands or fighting for justice. And, to be sure, all of those things are important dimensions of ministry. What we often miss, however, is that our model, Jesus, quite clearly demonstrates that an equally important dimension of ministry is the pause for reflection that precedes or follows the doing. He not only does this by going out into the desert at the beginning of his ministry. He continues to withdraw for reflection and prayer all during his ministry.

Certainly not every, but the average parish church in this country is filled with people who are looking to do something that will give meaning to their lives. In the past decade or two, I have noticed that young people, for example, have become highly motivated to engage in mission, relishing anything that is an obvious way to improve life for people in need. All of this is good. But in contrast, things like prayer (including meditation), fasting, study and reflection sit on the back burner, turned down real low. And, frankly, that is true here in St. Stephen’s. We prize doing. We are not so sure about reflecting. Sometimes human need and the pain of the world seem so great that it appears to be a shame not to be involved in doing something about it every waking minute.

Mark does not tell us much about the experience of Jesus. And in any case, the ultimate source of the withdrawal of Jesus had to be Jesus himself. No one else was around to observe or take notes. Both Matthew and Luke take Mark’s story and open it up, telling us the substance of the struggle that Jesus had, giving us graphic accounts of the temptations he faced. Not so Mark. He simply gives us, in his characteristically understated way, a sketch of what it was like when Jesus went on retreat. Jesus stayed in the desert. He was there for forty days. Satan tempted him. He was with the wild beasts. Angels ministered to him.

With that kind of billing, little wonder that the idea of withdrawal—retreat—desert experience lacks compelling attractiveness. It is much more rewarding to set about feeding the hungry or healing the sick. But there is something important about this withdrawal, something not to be missed. For one thing, it puts to flight the notion once and for all that there is much of a distinction between the inner life and the outer life after all. No one who engages in the active life of serving others or striving for peace and justice does that for very long without encountering temptation, beasts, and angels. Sometimes the temptation might be to try to change the world single-handedly and sometimes it is to give up entirely. Beasts can be systems that seem to be impossible to change and sometimes they are the very people that you are trying to help. Sometimes the angels are unexpected allies in the struggle and sometimes they are that mysterious source of energy that keeps us going when we want to stop. What is good about the desert experience is that it gives us the opportunity to face all these things before, during, or after we encounter them in the world of action.

We do not “do” ministry for very long before we realize that we ourselves are all mixed up in the world we are trying to address and even in the people that we are serving. We go to do something that in the abstract seems oh-so-loving and before we know it, we realize that we have all kinds of ego investments in the outcome. Or we rock along enjoying our ministry at Loaves and Fishes or visiting the sick and we realize suddenly that we are confronted with the possibility of stepping outside our comfort zone and our first impulse is to say no, maybe even to hide, to deny, to resign. All of that is quite natural. But it is all the more indicative of our need to reflect on, to pray about, to ponder the particular beasts and angels that get all mixed up inside ourselves and in the ministries that we do.

How would you be different come Easter, say, if this Lent you opened yourself to new possibilities of paying attention to your inner life? Have you ever been to a quiet day, like the one Carolyn Bluemle will lead next Saturday? You might want to try it. How might you understand your ministry better if you spent fifty minutes next Friday night focusing with us on “grounding,” a basic Christian practice that has deep implications for ecological stewardship as well as for spiritual growth?

Nothing is apt to surprise you much more than finding that this rhythm of ministry is also a harmony. Inner life and outer life are not in opposition; they harmonize. Action and contemplation are not in competition; they blend. Work and rest, withdrawal and assertion are not strangers; they complement each other. And, as Jesus’ life shows, the forty days in the desert prepared him for what was to come. Those who minister—which is all of us, all of the time—are likely to find that it is not just practical sense that leads us to do something like take time out for reflection. It really is nothing other than the Holy Spirit of God who drives us to do it.

© Frank G. Dunn, 2009

Las Hojas y Las Cenizas

Un sermón predicado a la iglesia de San Esteban y la Encarnación, Washington, DC, miércoles de cenizas, el 25 de febrero 2009

Cuando entraron ustedes en la iglesia esta noche, vieron que el espacio era diferente. A lado de la fuente hacia un árbol seco. Inmediatamente, se puso ver otro árbol detrás del altar. Miren la capilla de resurrección. Hay una colección de cuadras de la artista Margaret Parker, que dibuja y pinta muchas representaciones de árboles con ramos sin hojas.

Hace muchos meses, unos miembros de nuestra congregación han estado planeando nuestra observancia de cuaresma. Buscamos símbolos para significar el tema de renovación y crecimiento. Entonces elegimos el árbol. Durante invierno, como este invierno, el árbol está completamente desnudo, totalmente sin protección. Es necesario que el árbol pierda sus hojas a fin de que crezca otra vez.

De manera similar, nuestras almas necesitan quitarse todas las cosas que prohíben nuestro crecimiento en la imagen de Cristo. Envidia, arrogancia, codicia, crueldad: todas estas cosas debemos derramar como tantas hojas, que deben ser recogidos y quemados. Cenizas nos recuerdan que somos como árboles durante invierno—desnudos, puros, vacíos, listos para la primavera del Espíritu cuando podemos producir capullos nuevos.

En unos momentos vamos juntarnos alrededor la fuente para participar en la liturgia de miércoles de cenizas. Nos recordamos allá que morimos en bautismo como hojas del árbol, en preparación para vida nueva. En la imposición de cenizas, dejamos nuestros pecados. En la paz, recordamos que somos conectados a todo la comunidad de Cristo en la que crecimos juntos. Luego, vamos al altar para la comunión, recordando que cuando morimos, siempre resucitamos con Cristo para vivir. Siempre. Amen.

© Frank G. Dunn, 2009

Do We Need Priests?

The following is a summary of the project on which my thesis is based for the degree of Doctor of Ministry. I made the report to the parish of St. Stephen and the Incarnation, Washington, DC, on December 18, 2008. The thesis has been completed. I will be happy to answer further inquiries.

Continuing the Dialogue

Reflections on the Parish-wide Conversation,
“Priests: Do We Need Them?”
Fall, 2008

I could not be happier with the way the folks of St. Stephen’s participated in the survey and parish-wide conversation, “Priests: Do We Need Them?” In so doing, you supported me personally in my quest to be a Doctor of Ministry. More importantly, you engaged in a dialogue that is critical to the way we organize for and do ministry in St. Stephen and the Incarnation.

Ninety-three people took the survey online, and an additional six asked to take it manually. At least 70 people completed most of it. Approximately 70 persons participated in the meeting on Sunday, October 12 to view the presentation, hear the results of the survey, and to discuss the place of priesthood in our shared ministry. Forty-three persons turned in written responses to the discussion questions I posed. Those are remarkable figures. I am deeply grateful for your help and participation.

Parishioners regularly register a high degree of satisfaction with our parish life. Of those responding to the reflection questions on October 12, almost everyone had positive things to say about how they felt they were practicing priestly ministry in their lives. Most were quite positive about the way they feel supported in their ministries by the clergy. One may fairly ask if there is any value to pursuing this issue of whether we need priests, or what value ordained leadership has, or whether there is any point in articulating a coherent theology of priesthood when it seems to most people that ministry is working fairly well in St. Stephen’s. To those questions I respond by placing this discussion in several different contexts.

The Discussion in Context

Of immediate importance is the unique context of our “shared leadership model.” When St. Stephen’s went through an arduous and thorough process of thinking through its leadership needs beginning ten years ago, no one could have known the practical issues that would have to be dealt with as various senior wardens came and went and as senior priests accommodated themselves to a system quite different from the standard arrangement in the Church. We have learned some things in the last four and a half years, and we continue to learn. It is clear now, for example, that the senior priest, while in theory having no direct responsibility for parish finances, must in fact be a part of the oversight of fundraising, budgeting, and financial management. This can significantly impact the time commitments of the senior priest. Likewise, in a system that is used to carrying on liturgically and pastorally without direct involvement and supervision of ordained clergy, it can be problematic for clergy sometimes to know who is taking responsibility for what. And when decisions have to be made, it is not always clear who has the authority or the responsibility for making a decision, or how it is to be made. Almost all parish systems operate on some model of “shared leadership.” Rarely is there a single person who has all the authority and all the responsibility for making every decision and for setting the course of the entire ministry. Our particular form of shared ministry, however, necessitates constant communication, flexibility, a high tolerance for ambiguity, willingness to negotiate boundaries and roles, and sometimes a staggering degree of volunteer time, especially on the part of the senior warden, whose responsibilities can be daunting.

One of the reasons for doing this project, then, has to do with the reality that St. Stephen’s, in practicing a ministry that takes lay persons’ gifts seriously, has chosen to create a system that demands deep lay commitment. There is no default position that the clergy, especially the senior priest, is ultimately responsible for the wellbeing of the church. While such an idea of “shared ministry” is attractive and laudable, it depends directly on the willingness of lay persons continually to make major time commitments and very real sacrifices. Furthermore, a priest in such a system, having been trained to exercise leadership in a generally hierarchical structure, finds herself or himself constantly challenged to use a variety of skills—not all of them mature—in exploring and testing what sorts of leadership will effectively move the parish towards its goals. Indeed it is not clear who has the responsibility for guiding the parish towards it goals, or how those goals originate, or who is accountable for monitoring the progress towards meeting them. This is not to say that the “shared leadership model” is basically flawed. But it is to say that it rests on a number of assumptions that have not always been thoroughly understood. And it is not completely rhetorical to ask ,“Do we need priests?” when it is far from certain exactly what priests do that any lay persons cannot do as well or better. If shared ministry is to work, somewhere along the way—better sooner than later—folks involved in it need to know what it is they are doing, how they are doing it, and who is responsible for what.

Not as a part of this project per se, but arising out of this same cluster of questions, the senior and junior wardens, Jane Bishop and Cam Crockett, have joined with Brian Best and me this fall in a set of conversations reviewing the shared ministry model and how it is working. The details of those conversations are not germane to this report, but one of the outcomes of this project has been that we do have a base for seeing more clearly now both what the parish understands priesthood to be about (as practiced both by the ordained and more generally by the entire Christian community). Several things have driven this evaluation. The main one is that we need to make sure that we have a doable and sustainable job for the senior warden. Otherwise the system cannot function.

Another context in which this project needs to be seen is the trajectory of growth of the parish. While that growth is not linear and uninterrupted, it has in fact occurred over the last several years, especially as the neighborhood has changed, the congregation’s demographic is shifting (lots of new babies, for example!), and economic stresses make themselves felt. We have had major decisions to make. Every indicator suggests that we will continue to have more to make. One example is the revisions to our building necessitated by the moving out of the Washington Free Clinic requiring renovating the third floor of the parish house to make marketable office space. Another is the refurbishment of our church school space this year in response to a growing population of youngsters. Another decision, or set of decisions, has had to do with our burgeoning Latino ministry and the need to stabilize financially the clergy leadership of it. Decisions like these are all related to the parish’s possible and actual growth. They are inherently related to the core mission of St. Stephen’s and the way it understands its ministry. My point is that decisions like these will continue to confront the parish and will demand that there be a clear way of addressing concerns and coming to conclusions that is clear, direct, and effective. A complicated, unclear, or unrealistic method of decision-making will impede the parish’s growth and hamper its ability to accomplish its mission.

Yet I place this project in a still larger context. The Episcopal Church began looking afresh at the meaning of priesthood in the 1970’s when the question of ordaining women began to reshape people’s thinking. A number of writers began exploring the meaning of ordination, specifically priestly ordination, arguing that there was nothing about it that prima facie disqualified women. At the same time a number of people working on issues of ministry encouraged the Church to look seriously at the ministry of all the baptized as fundamental to its mission. Interestingly, St. Stephen’s was at the forefront of both these movements. The rise of emphasis on both ordination and total ministry lifted into prominence the question of how the priest is and what the priest does in community. The more the Church has sorted out questions surrounding ordination, the larger looms the question of whether we need priests in the first place. Clearly, the way the Church structures its liturgy and polity, it needs priests. It needs priests because, by delegating to them the regulation of its liturgical life, it has made them essential. It also needs them because to this day they are trained to be leaders of the Christian community. When liturgical life and community leadership cease to be the province of the priest, an identity crisis ensues in which priests begin to wonder whether they have any use or value. In turn, that can lead, as identity crises often do, to unproductive reaction in the form of withdrawal, over-functioning, excessive control, or burnout. Thus the question of what a priest is, what a priest does, and how the priest relates to the larger community of the baptized is not at all minor or incidental to the practice of ministry in the wider Church.

Some things I learned from the survey

The understanding of priesthood among the people of St. Stephen’s does not greatly different from that in the larger Church. Priests are seen as leaders; as ministers of the Church’s core possessions, Word and Sacrament; as guardians and interpreters of Tradition; and as spiritually aware persons who can listen, support, guide, forgive, bless, and heal. (Incidentally, priests in this community are not too frequently seen as healers, judging from the survey.) But priests are clearly not seen on the whole as superior, either essentially or morally, to other Christians, nor as enjoying greater importance than lay persons within the Body of Christ. On the edges, there is on the one hand noticeable clergy dependence, and on the other hand some anti-clericalism. But the great majority of people see priests as valuable and their various responsibilities as integral to the life of the Church. A strong majority see ordination as a necessary element in the life of the Church.

Things you said in the conversation

There were four questions at the end of the power point presentation on which participants were asked to reflect and to talk with each other. One was “if ‘the priesthood of all believers’ means that we all practice Christ’s ministry of reconciliation, how do you practice priestly ministry in your life here and now?” A number of people identified their daily life and work as the context for doing so. A few mentioned their roles in church and their attempts to bring people into the Christian assembly. One respondent wrote, “[I practice priestly ministry] by being a human vessel for the will of God and the interconnected web of existence.” A number of people mentioned that they practice their ministry in their work for justice. Clearly reaching out to housemates, co-workers, neighbors, and friends with sensitivity and compassion is key to Christian practice for a great many people. Others identify particular devotional practices, such as tithing, reading and studying the Bible, and prayer as ways in which they live their ministries.

A second question asked, “How have the clergy at St. Stephen’s supported you in your ministry?” Sermons, teaching, listening, caring, reflecting, were some of the things you mentioned. Offering the community’s rituals, inspiring liturgies, welcoming, and support in times of crisis were other things you noted.

To the third question, “Do we have an adequate understanding of priesthood in St. Stephen’s, you were rather evenly divided between those who said yes and those who said no. A fair number of people answered with qualifications, one way or the other.

About three-fourths of those responding to the questions offered suggestions of next steps that we might take “to deepen our understanding of how all of us, priests and lay people, fit together in the one ministry which is Christ’s.” Suggestions ranged from having more small groups, to occasional conversations like the one on October 12, to prayer groups, to sermons and adult forums. Many expressed a desire not to drop the topic but to continue discussing it. Some saw ministry in either more specific or more generic ways than a limited discussion of priesthood or shared ministry. One suggested that there be a “verdant earth” group looking at ways that we can live more ecologically responsibly.

Where do we go from here?

Almost certainly we shall be looking as a community at our shared leadership model in the near future. That look will no doubt be informed by much of what we have learned about our own thinking in relation to priesthood specifically and to ministry in general.

Those who have some energy around the formation of groups, whether for ecological sensitivity or for prayer or for some other purpose will need to take responsibility for announcing a date, time, and place for such a group to meet and organize. Let others gather around you. We can offer you support and resources in some cases, and the parish office can definitely offer you help in communicating.

Given the interest in the topic, either narrowly or broadly, it would seem to me that we need to look for opportunities to continue the dialogue. One possibility is to use our Fridays in Lent as opportunities to look at some dimension(s) of ministry. Another is to plan next year’s adult forums and other Christian formation opportunities with these issues in mind. A third is to use the resources we have, preaching for example, to address some of these concerns more directly. And a fourth is occasionally to revisit these matters with a special meeting, as some in fact suggested. I could see, for example, an annual “mini-conference” perhaps on a Friday night and Saturday morning, or on another Sunday after the 10:30 liturgy, dealing with some aspect of our ministry together. My concern is that we not have “just another program” that overloads already busy lives, but that we gather to reflect in a way that is directly and clearly tied to the central missional consciousness of St. Stephen’s.

Frank G. Dunn
18 December 2008

© Frank G. Dunn, 2009