The Park Road Pulpit

It starts on the playground. We have all been there. In the innocent play of children and our childish games, someone else begins to define us. [Raise hand and urge to be picked.(“Ooo-ooo, pick me!”)] Tender hearts learn in tender years that we are liked. “I’ll take you…” That we are wanted. “…and you…” That we are capable. “…and you…” That we are accepted. “…and…you.” [Hand goes down.]

It starts on the playground. And the childish game of choosing people never, ever stops. Choosing is always deadly serious business. Because choosing can make someone (individually), or break someone (emotionally). And whom we choose can make us (corporately) or break us (spiritually). It is always so. There should be a way that leads beyond the playground. Because out of any choice (and out of even the most carefully constructed system of choosing), everyone always walks away from the playground with a question.[1] You know that I love questions, but the problem is that too many of those who walk away, walk away asking the right question, but in the wrong way.

And too many who are not chosen ask, in self-doubt, “Who am I?” (I must be nobody!)

The first lesson that we must learn, then, when choosing and ordaining Deacons, is that choosing them does not define you. The chosen cannot truly define the un-chosen. For the good news at the heart of the Good News is this: I am who I am who I am. By the grace of God. Thanks be to God. We must begin to believe this.

Stated another way, the first thing we must learn in choosing and ordaining deacons is that those who are chosen are chosen for good reason. For good reasons. (The chosen have abilities. The chosen are eager. The chosen have been found faithful.) But… if we are honest about the church (which can be just another “playground”), we will also have to admit that Deacons are also chosen for not such good reasons. You know? (The chosen are well-liked. The chosen have names that people know. The chosen (dare I say it?) just got one more vote than four others who were not chosen. It is a mostly unspoken reality that some who would serve best will never be chosen, and some who are chosen will never serve best.

Please do not misunderstand me. Whom we have chosen, we have chosen well. You who were chosen have made good names for yourselves in this community of faith. You will serve well. You will make us better. I have no doubt. But the choosing of Deacons must neither be a cause of pride for those who are chosen, nor a call to shame for those who are not chosen.

There should be a way that leads beyond the playground. There should be a better way. A more excellent way.[2] And perhaps there is. But we will have to grow up to find it. The chosen will have to grow up. The un-chosen will have to grow up. The community will have to grow up, and we will all have to learn to ask the right question, the right way.[3]

Isaiah was called, in the presence of God, which must not be all that different from being called in the presence of any real community,[4] and we can learn something of the right way to ask the right question in listening to his response. Paul shared his story of faith, which is the calling of every Deacon (of every minister [looking at congregation]), and in the telling of it, he interweaves his own story. The “word of the Lord,” becomes Paul’s own word.[5] And his story is another example of asking the right question in the right way.

Humility, as C.S. Lewis cleverly reminds us, is not some disguised form of self-humiliation – that is, it is not thinking less of ourselves than we ought to think. Humility is honesty. Humility is seeing clearly. Humility is admitting our weaknesses. And, humility is celebrating our strengths.[6]

Isaiah and Paul respond to their calling in “shock and awe,”[7] and their emotion is rightly expressed. Being chosen should always remind us how small we are in light of “the big picture.” Who am I? And what can I really offer in the grand scheme of things? Humility begins in such recognition. But humility will not let us wither on the vine out of fear and apathy.

Woe is me… for I am unclean… for I am the least worthy to be chosen… (but by the grace of God, I am who I am who I am)… So here am I… Send me, anyway!

Humility is right recognition – which leads to real response. There is a more-excellent way, which might yet lead us beyond the playground of wounded choosers. For humility will lead us to see clearly, to know fully, to be fully known (1 Corinthians 13), and in so doing, the chosen, and the not-so-chosen will learn the meaning of Grace. Only as we learn to love our neighbors as we love our selves (Mark 12.31). And as we learn to love ourselves as we love our neighbors. Will we finally know how to ask the right question the right way.

[1] Park Road Baptist Church has conducted elections in a number of different ways, and our current system is again being critiqued. The deacons will review our policy this year and make a report to the congregation. We may need to change the system. I would not oppose this. I am convinced, however, that no system is without its difficulties, and no system of choosing can be free from inflicting wounds, unintentional though they may be.

[2] I allude here to the words of Paul in 1 Corinthians 12.31. He has spoken of a variety of gifts and services, addressing a congregation that was struggling over competing claims. Are some gifts or services better than others? And the people who possess them? Paul reprimands the church for its competitive claims for acknowledgement or reward and concludes: But strive for the greater gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way. That way, is the way of love, which is the greatest of all.

[3] When I think of “growing up” spiritually, I always am reminded of the following challenging quotation from the martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. “Our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as those who manage our lives without God. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us. The God who lets us live in the word without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continuously. Before God and with God we live without God. …God is weak and powerless in the world and that is precisely the way, the only way in which he is with us to help us.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in a letter to Eberhard Bethge dated July 16, 1944, from his book Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 219. Emphases added.

[4] If we affirm God as Trinity (a community of persons), then the gathered community is an extended expression of God, and our callings to one another are extensions of God’s calling.

[5] Ironically, in a Sunday School class which I taught this morning, we discussed the reader/response litany which we currently use in worship following scripture: “You have heard the ancient story/Let us listen now for the word of the Lord.” (Instead of the more traditional: “This is the Word of the Lord/Thanks be to God.”) Though a number of class members expressed their opposition, I believe that a word is not “God’s word” simply because it is found between the pages of a Bible. Scripture, as with any “word,” becomes “God’s word” only when it is a “living word” (Hebrews 4) – when we have engaged it in our own lives.

[6] This morning’s bulletin contained the following quotations: “To anticipate the Enemy’s strategy, we must consider His aims. The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour’s talents – or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognize all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things. He wants to kill their animal self-love as soon as possible; but it is His long-term policy, I fear, to restore to them a new kind of self-love –a charity and gratitude for all selves, including their own; when they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours…” and, “You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it, not as self-forgetfulness, but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character. Some talents, I gather, he really has. Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be… The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue.” C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters.

[7] The 2003 invasion of Iraq was described, by administration officials as a military exercise of “shock and awe.”

[8] The Hebrew word for “Adam,” is adamah, which means, ground or dirt. God created “Adam” out of the adamah, and we will find humility in being in touch with our true humanity.