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The Rev. Frank Logue Unwrap Your Gift This sermon started off as another sermon, a sermon for a different setting. The Bishop asked me to preach a sermon in Darien a few Sundays ago. It was an evening service as the congregations of St. Andrews Episcopal Church and St. Cyprian’s Episcopal Church joined to welcome their new pastor, Ted Clarkson. Coming in from out of town as something like a hired gun brings certain opportunities. I get to say some things that need to be said and then leave. So some of what I said on that fine July evening with two congregations welcoming their new pastor is this:
I also said:
Then I went on to shore up my case using Barbara Brown Taylor’s recent book Leaving Church: a memoir of faith. In it the one-time small town pastor now professor and lecturer tells of how she came to decide to pursue becoming a small town priest after serving scores of 60- to 80-hour weeks as one of four priests at a large Episcopal church in downtown Atlanta. She writes, I knew I was tired when I started seeing things that were not there. Driving home in the evening, I would see the crushed body of a brown dog lying in the middle of the street up ahead, causing a great howl of grief to rise up inside of me. By the time I reached the corpse, it had turned into a crushed cardboard box instead. When this happened twice in a row, I knew I was tired. Barbara Brown Taylor goes on to write, I had remedies in place to help me keep my pace. I climbed the StairMaster at the gym. I paid monthly visits to a pastoral counselor. I planned vacations to exotic places where there were no telephones. Some guilt was involved in all but the first of these, since I had the idea that the practice of ministry alone should nourish me. Maybe I had read The Diary of a Country Priest too often, or maybe I was too much of a romantic, but I thought God would keep depositing funds in my account whenever my balance got low. I thought all that I had to do was give myself fully to the work, and God would keep me in business. Instead, I was seeing a lot of corpses in the road, and telling myself they were not really there did nothing to diminish my grief. Having added Barbara Brown Taylor’s experience to my own words, I had the congregation right where I needed them to say,
With the congregation now properly warned about the possible dangers ahead, I let them know of something else I was convinced was true and said, Now y’all are smart folks and pretty well spiritually grounded and so I haven’t actually said anything new here this evening. We all know this. We know we are only human and we know that pastors need to take care of themselves even as they care for a congregation. You know this as well as I do. But it is worth holding up tonight that there is another way that doesn’t even skirt the edges of a burn out pastor making dead dogs out of cardboard boxes in the median of the road. The other way is the one found in the Bible and the one found in the words of the liturgy for this evening.
You see, the Bible knows nothing about a professional minister
doing the work of God on behalf of a congregation of believers. The Bible only
knows of and describes a life in which every single Christian is a minister no
matter their age or ability. You are a minister of the Gospel by virtue of
your baptism. Ted’s job is not to be the sole minister in a congregation of
his followers. Ted’s job is that of pastor and teacher to a congregation of
ministers who all follow Jesus. That evening the Epistle reading was from Romans 12 with Paul describing the church as a group of “many members” saying “all the members do not have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ and individually members one of another.” So I explained, A well functioning body does not have the foot serving as a hand or an ear trying to pretend that it is an eye. In church terms this means that your congregations will thrive when people are doing the ministry God built him or her to do. Take someone built to work behind the scenes planning and coordinating and put that person out in front speaking and leading and you have your body parts out of order.
But when you get people with the right gifts in the right job, it is so much easier. Take Ted, who God created to pastor a congregation and give him a chance to do just that and you will see him thrive. But if you burden him with a lot of other junk better handled by someone else, you’ll make each other unhappy. It’s all about discovering the gifts in your congregations and unleashing those gifts in service both within St. Cyprian’s and St. Andrew’s and within McIntosh County. This is where I leave that sermon behind. I went in to town, warned them that ministry was not the job of their new pastor alone. I reminded them that each and every one of the members of those two congregations are ministers of the Gospel by virtue of their baptism. Then I closed my sermon, received communion and drove south. It was the sermon the scripture readings for that evening called for. It was the sermon the congregations needed to hear as they ushered in the new ministry of Ted Clarkson. And it was the sermon Ted could not give without sounding self-serving of not self-centered. Then we come to this morning and a reading from the letter to the Ephesians in which we hear,
We have different gifts from God. Not everyone of us is called to preach or teach and not every one, thank God, is a prophet. But we have a variety of gifts within the church and we have those various gifts for a specific purpose. The reading from Ephesians goes on to say that we have these gifts “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for the building of the body of Christ.” The gifts of the preacher, teacher, evangelist, prophet and others are to build up the saints, that means y’all. Saints is a New Testament word referring to all Christians. The work of those roles within the church are to build up the whole body of the saints. Our reading ends saying that “as each part is working properly” it promotes the body’s growth in “building itself up in love.” So the way to grow the Body of Christ, the way to build the Body of Christ up in love is to get each part of the body working properly. This is the real gift of a church that has grown up and has its act together is that people get to live into being the person God has made him or her to be. You see if we get this wrong, we have to beg people to do things they don’t like to do. That’s how someone ends up teaching Sunday School and only feels used. The way the Body of Christ is supposed to work is that people do what they enjoy doing for the greater glory of the group. Here are some examples from this very week in this very congregation. This week I saw Mike and Diana Waldron working hard to keep our grounds in order as they edged the grass and mulched the beds. Meanwhile, Mike Helton was working to get video cameras into the classrooms of The Preschool, where JoAnn White works to oversee the finances. Melissa Rogers was working on planning today’s meeting after our worship on our children’s church ministry, for which Karen Beck keeps the schedule. Your Mission Council met and among other things approved of the plans Al Virgin has been working on for our memorial garden. Robin Davenport-Ray had to slip out of the meeting right as we were ending to slide into his role as Scoutmaster of our Boy Scout troop. Neil Maxwell worked quietly and efficiently as always to get the deposits made and the checks written for the church, including extra early morning trips over to get me the discretionary fund checks to assist people in need. Carol Ludwigson played the organ for our Wednesday evening communion service. June Maxwell and Sande Schimdt worked on a plan to feed the community right in this room on Thanksgiving. And on Wednesday evening Sandy Shutak, Karen Shirley and Diana Waldron led a meeting of mostly newcomers to King of Peace planning crafts and other details for the Holiday Bazaar. Janet Finkelstein folded your bulletins on Friday as she has faithfully for more than five years. Janice Morris led the Women’s Faith Walk yesterday afternoon. Last evening Al Abel joined Freddie and Enree Esparagoza at Our Lady Star of the Sea Catholic Church in St. Marys as they provided music for their worship and went over our music for this morning. Then earlier morning Celeste McCullough showed up early yet again to lay out the acolytes and other servers robes. And then the servers and greeters and readers and others arrived to lead our worship this morning. And these are just the people and activities I noticed and this was just this week. This is how the Body of Christ functions with various people doing the things God leads them to do using the gifts God has given them. It is not about you getting forced into some role you don’t enjoy. It is about each of us finding the place God has for us to use our gifts. Much of that will take place out in the community as you use your gifts in other places, and some of it will happen here at King of Peace as you use the gifts God has given you to build up your church community. The question is not whether God has given you any gifts to share with others. The thing to ask yourself is what gifts has God given me and how am I to use them. Amen.
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