2006 Renewal of Vows

Sermon by Bishop Margaret G. Payne
Vow Renewal, Trinity Lutheran Church, Worcester, Mass.
April 4, 2006

Many years ago I stood at the back door of the last car of a train that was rumbling south in India. The train was packed tighter than a small sanctuary on Christmas Eve only instead of the chill of a dark night outside the air outside (and inside) the train was hot and steamy and smelly and dusty.

I held in my hand a clay cup – roughly shaped and still wet inside from the chai that I had just finished drinking. In Indian train stations, and along the tracks when trains come to a halt – not an uncommon event that can add as much as a day to a one-day trip at those times – chai wallas come to sell you tea. They dip the tea out of buckets and ladle it into clay cups – crude cups, misshapen cups, cups with chips and cracks, and you take your cup of chai, and then the train pulls away.

After you drink the tea, you do not have to worry about receptacles or litter or fines, you throw the cup back outside, where it breaks on impact and then, gradually, becomes part of the soil, raw material for the creation of new cups.

Standing at the back door of that train, part of me wanted to keep the cup – to have it as a souvenir of the time I lived in a country when cycling and re-cyling – of cups, bowls, and lives, is the holy rhythm of life. But I threw it away and watched it smash on the hard earth – partly for the satisfaction of doing something that I always had been told not to do – and partly for the joy of participating in the cycle.

There are other cycles that are more familiar to me – the holy rhythm of the liturgical year is a cycle, and it also includes a brokenness the body of Christ thrown onto a cross and broken – raw material for the creation of new life. And now we have come around to that place in the cycle of our Church Year.

I was pleased that these texts have given me the opportunity to talk about pottery – the throwing and centering and shaping and firing – I could go in a dozen directions with this sermon. But I knew that the planners of this worship were thinking of brokenness – you see broken things in front of you – they remind us of the brokenness of our world, the anxiety of our time.

We see these broken things, and if we are honest, we see broken things inside of us, too – so many broken things, inside and out, here and all around the world. Despite hopes for peace and justice and the end of suffering, and so many good people working so hard to accomplish it, our world is filled with war and plans for more war, with heavings of the earth and the seas that kill people by the thousand, with terrorists and greed and more kinds of fear and illness than we can name.

What is our call as leaders in the church in this world of brokenness? And how do we renew our call and find the strength to do it? How do we do “tikkun olam” – the healing, or repair, of the world? Paradoxically – by embracing brokenness.

Of course, the first book that came to mind as I thought about these things was The Wounded Healer by Henri Nouwen. It doesn’t seem possible that there was a time when that phrase didn’t exist – we always needed it, the way we always needed wheels on suitcases, but it took centuries for it to come into being – this way of describing those who serve the suffering servant, and who understand that our deepest truth comes from the cross.

It is wounds that are Jesus’ credentials, not worldly victory, and it is through the acknowledgement and embrace of our own sin and woundedness that we find the way into the suffering, and then the healing, of the world. Seeing and embracing our own brokenness is not the same as workaholism or a Christ-complex or playing the victim it grows from faith in Jesus Christ, and, against all reasonable odds and evidence to the contrary, in his promises.

Embracing our own brokenness is stepping into the whole human mystery of self – deeply enough to get beneath the glory, to use our sin as a lens for our work, and then to launch into ministry – knowing that it is God who does it through us – to know that it is our scars and not our muscles that God uses to enable us to be the vessels of love and justice and peace.

A “wounded healer” can do two things particularly well – and I would like to think about them today as we confess, and renew our vows of service, and bless oil for anointing. Wounded healers have learned how to articulate the inner life. I think that one of the reasons that people do not come to our churches is that we have not been able to articulate their inner turmoil, and so, why would they think that we can calm it?

And, of course, the first place to begin is within our own hearts, to become familiar with the complexities of our inner lives, to resist the temptation to be the one with all the answers, and to open our eyes first to our own brokenness and fear, and then turn to help others to do the same.

Unless pastors can be spiritual leaders and guides, unless they can discern, understand, and articulate the fear and emptiness that claims so many people, and model the way to bring them to God for healing, then the shallow spiritualities and idols and false theologies of glory will be the way that people seek wholeness ... and they will not find it there.

As parish pastors, we also have to articulate what is going on in the inner life of our community of faith, and preach boldly about all of the things that are woven into the life of the community, both things present, and things from the past, and things difficult to bring to light. The secrets that congregations keep are the biggest cause of ineffective ministry; the need to cover up brokenness and appear polished and together keeps healing from happening and ministry from thriving, from doing the impossible – which is possible with God.

Each week for the sermon, we bring together the texts and the life of the community and our own inner work – our prayer and pain and ruffled feathers – and toss in the things that are going on in the world, then knead them together for a while before we center them on the spinning wheel to be shaped, God’s hands over ours, into the vessel of the sermon for that week, the cup of the Word.

When I come to preach as your bishop, I may have an interesting message and it may be nice for them to hear another voice, but I am not able to do your work because I am not walking with them, listening, breaking, shaping.

Before I came to New England I did supply preaching occasionally in New Jersey. One Sunday I climbed into the pulpit of an older white congregation with a changing neighborhood around it that was resisting outreach and ministry in the community, and, boy, was I ready to let them know what I thought about that.

I tried to be gentle, of course, and built very gradually up to the announcement of God’s will that we be shaped as instruments of justice and peace in our communities, and I was both gratified and uncomfortable that the congregation was in tears, moved, I thought, by the call to be God’s people in that place.

It was only after the service that someone took the time to tell me that during the previous week, one of the youngest members of the congregation, a young woman in her thirties who was active in the church and greatly beloved, had fallen off a horse, and broken her neck, and died. Of course, they should have told me – but that’s not the point – the point is that I didn’t know their brokenness and so I could not preach to them in an effective way, a way that would enable God’s Word to be heard at that time, in that place.

Authentic preaching is about articulating the deepest inner workings of the community, and describing the ways in which God is present in that with hope and promise, and looking together for the shape of the mystery that is their call – grieving when grieving is needed, shouting when ears get plugged and rejoicing when a scary place turns into holy ground.

Nouwen also talked about the centrality of compassion. In describing how Christian leaders must lead, he said: Compassion must become the core and even the nature of authority. And I would add that compassion must become the mantra of all our days.

We can practice it in so many ways – compassion for the driver that pulls in front of us suddenly, compassion for the person in front of us in the supermarket line, compassion for those who live in different color skins or are different in other ways from the familiarity of our own ways, and the daily remembering of compassion for others who are needy, who are struggling with hunger each day while we battle to try to eat less or keep up the payments on our homes, and the daily asking: What shall I do about that?

When Jesus looked upon the crowd – he always had compassion on those people.

And when Jesus recognized compassion in others, he always praised it. When the unnamed woman in the gospel story poured onto him the oil of compassion – costly oil, a ridiculously extravagant and socially unacceptable gesture and in defiance of the norms of care for the poor … he praised her greatly. He announced that her deed goes hand in hand with the proclamation of the gospel, he asks us to remember her and the way that she honored him with a compassionate anointing that no one else thought to provide.

Our truest authority as followers of Christ comes from sharing his compassion – compassion that breaks down boundaries, cannot resist forgiveness, recognizes that the sin we see in others is the same as the sin in our own hearts, and learning to love even our enemies.

We cannot manufacture that kind of compassion within ourselves – it comes to us from God, given as a gift of new life, and an essential tool for ministry. After all of the vows that you made when you became a leader in the church, a bishop had the honor of explaining that though we have the will to keep those vows. It is only by God’s grace that we are given the strength and compassion to do them.

When I began my studies to be a potter, I was enslaved by the performance expectations that I had brought to everything I have ever done in my life. I like to blame it on my demanding and German mother (perhaps that’s redundant) but since she died 38 years ago, I have finally had to confess that I have internalized her expectations for: perfection (anything worth doing is worth doing well), productivity (waste not , want not), and sweating everything – from the small stuff to the big stuff and everything in between.

And so I sat down at the wheel with those expectations of hard work, and perfection and productivity – and with a heart devoid of playfulness. The first time my clay collapsed from a shape resembling a bowl into a shape resembling one of the cow patties in the meadow on the farm, I was devastated – I felt that I had failed. But instead of being disappointed in me, or angry, or unforgiving – the teacher just said: “My goodness, I guess the clay wasn’t ready to take that shape right now. Let’s start over and try again.”

I know this is going to sound like a ridiculous overstatement – but suddenly I had an epiphany of grace. “You are the potter, we are the clay.” And the kind of potter that God is … is endlessly patient and forgiving, is compassionate, is utterly accepting of our earthen nature. God keeps shaping us, and renewing us, being present with us when we break down and are smashed in the soil, and then lifting us up and shaping us again, always knowing our sin and limitations but never letting them stand in the way of reminding us of our infinite worth through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Amen.