Along
with some other members of St. John’s I spent last week up at the Bishop’s
Ranch, near Healdsburg, at an educational program of our diocese called the
College for Congregational Development. The
purpose of the vestry in sending us there was to move our parish closer to one
of our strategic goals, which is to strengthen the capacity of all of our
leaders, to help our various ministries, groups and committees, and the whole parish
organization, to work together more effectively so that we can become more and
more of what God is calling us to be.
The
week was the beginning of a two-year program, which commits the participants to
a substantial reading list of books, a second residential intensive a year from
now, and projects to design and carry out, complete with written reports, and a
final exam. We followed an intensive
schedule of reading, presentations, small group learning labs, and project
planning that began with Morning Prayer at 7:30 a.m. and ended with compline at
9 o’clock at night. We worked on
facilitation and group process skills and conceptual models of organizational
structures, and of change, conflict, and even spiritual transformation within
congregations. We even learned models
for human mental functions and how they operate differently according to
personality type. We had completed in
advance a personality assessment tool that is widely used in universities and
in corporate America, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and on Tuesday we
received the results, which identified us with one of 16 different personality
types, and told us how we prefer to interact with others, and what are our
areas of strength, in what perceive, and how we make decisions and deal with
conflict.
There’s
a whole theory of mental functioning, that lies behind this system, and it was
while one of the workshop trainers was trying to explain some of that to us,
that one of my clergy colleagues in the diocese asked a question that had also
been nagging at me. In the course of her
presentation, the trainer had said that these were the modes of “normal” mental
functioning, and the types of “normal” personality, and so on. So when it came time for questions, this
priest, who happens to be a woman, pointed this out and asked “but what if
you’re not normal?” The trainer gave a sort of an answer and then
quickly moved on, but the question is not a frivolous one. It points to something essentially important
about human beings, and also about the church.
Now,
I’m not saying it’s wrong to borrow ideas and approaches from the business
world and the social sciences to help us do the work of the church more
effectively. It is okay to talk about
forces and dynamics, about data and feedback, about structures and systems and normal
functioning. But the Christian
understanding of human beings is that our mental functioning, and our church organizations, are grounded in bodies. And bodies can
get out whack in all kinds of ways: from congenital conditions to senile
dementia, from brain tumors and head injuries to autism and schizophrenia, from
post-traumatic stress to clinical depression to alcoholism, things happen to
our bodies that affect our minds, and even change our personalities.
In
the business world, if a person has a body that does not function as the
organization needs it to, because he or she cannot effectively count beans, or
produce widgets, or what have you, the manager will “let” that person “go” or
never invite him or her to work there in the first place. But as Christians we don’t have that option. Not if we are sincere about following
Jesus. Because the gospels tell us
stories, again and again, about people whose bodies, or minds and behavior, were
not normal in the eyes of their neighbors.
These people came to Jesus looking for help and he welcomed them. He told them that their faith in him had made
them well, and sent them away in peace.
Today’s
story from the Gospel of Luke reminds us that this brought Jesus into conflict
with his religious contemporaries. When
Simon the Pharisee decides that Jesus must not really be a prophet, it is not
because he disagrees with him about theological ideas, or ethical principles. Simon has second thoughts about Jesus because
he lets a woman touch him. It wasn’t
normal for Jesus, a devout Jewish man, to let a woman who was not his wife or a
close female relative touch his body, let alone to bathe his feet with her
tears and dry them with her hair. What
makes it worse is that this woman is notorious for her sins, presumably sins of
a sexual nature, which made her body a doubly potent source of contamination. But instead of pushing her away, refusing to
admit her into his company, Jesus accepts her lavishly inappropriate gestures
of repentance and gratitude and love. He
repays her with words of respect and forgiveness, the forgiveness that makes
her body touchable again.
Now Jesus
didn’t always just heal people and then send them away. Sometimes he called them to be a part of his
mission. In his classic text, The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich
Bonhoeffer wrote the following:
“A truth, a doctrine, or a religion needs no space for
itself. They are disembodied
entities. They are heard, learned, and
apprehended, and that is all. But the
incarnate Son of God needs not only ears or hearts, but living people who will
follow him. That is why he called his
disciples into a literal, bodily following, and thus made his fellowship with
them a visible reality.”
We
are used to thinking of the calling of disciples as a manly sort of
business. Peter and Andrew and James and
John are by the Sea of Galilee mending their nets, when Jesus walks by and says
“Come, follow me,” and they unhesitatingly drop everything and go after
him. They go to be leaders, apostles of
the kingdom and fishers of men. But today’s
passage in Luke reminds us that sometimes the calling of a disciple is not recruitment
for a brave and noble mission. Sometimes
it begins as a desperate plea for relief from torment. Mary Magdalene must have been seriously
deranged, for Jesus to have cast out seven demons from her. Still, in its own way, coming out of the
shadows of disgrace and untouchability to seek healing and restoration to
community is just as heroic, takes just as much courage, and faith, as that
other kind of following.
And Luke
wants us to see, with Bonhoeffer that, from the beginning, our fellowship with
the Incarnate Son of God has been embodied in a visible reality, a community. In the Episcopal Church, the core of our
identity is continuity with the first community of those that Jesus of Nazareth
called to follow him. Every time we add a
new member to the church in baptism, the priest or bishop asks “will you
continue in the apostles’ fellowship?” and the congregation says, “I will with
God’s help.” After the rite is complete,
the congregation greets the newly baptized, saying “we receive you into the
household of God.” Like any other
household this visible reality requires managing. It needs leadership. But sometimes leadership looks less like
having great ideas and telling others what to do and more like noticing what
other people need, what are the broken pieces that need mending and the loose
ends that need tying. According to Luke
it was the women, who followed because they had been sick and became well, who
first exercised this leadership in the church.
We can’t forget that it was they who obtained the spices needed to
prepare a body for burial, they whose sorrow and need for a final, physical
demonstration of love led them to Jesus’ tomb.
And
if this it is a household its members are a family. But a new kind of family, one united not by
of genetic inheritance or even by their natural love for each other, but by the
grace of God. Just as we don’t get to
choose who we will have as our parents, or our brothers or sisters, we don’t
get to choose the people whom the incarnate Son of God Christ calls into
fellowship with us. We don’t get to set
criteria of eligibility, or send away the family members who don’t meet our standard
of past history, education, or experience.
And there is no right kind of body, no “normal” height or weight or sex
or color of the skin, but one body, crucified and raised in glory, into which
all are called by the grace and mercy of God.
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