Committment to what or to Whom?

A Reflection on II Epiphany                                          All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, N.C. January 19, 2014                                                   Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Isaiah 49:1-7                       1 Corinthians 1:1-9                          John 1:29-42                       Psalm 40:1-12

I changed the question for meditation in the bulletin this morning to “To what or to whom do we commit ourselves? The idea of the question for meditation is for those who come to worship here to have a question to begin an internal dialogue with God as you wait for the church service to begin. My hope is that today’s Bible lessons and the sermon might help us to continue our internal dialogue, sometimes called individual prayer, and our corporate dialogue, or Common Prayer, in this body of Christ assembled, or as we know it, “All Saints’ Church”.

The Gospel story for today is about

Commitment. I think that it is a condensed story in which a series of statements actually cover a long period of time, but are remembered or edited into one day, which begins when two of John the Baptizer’s disciples decide to follow Jesus. They go as people who have received a recommendation from John about checking out this person named Jesus. That is usually how we begin commitments, when something attracts our attention. Later they commit themselves to being a shopper and checking out the goods about this person. Jesus then challenges them about what they are looking for. They commit themselves to check him out further by going to learn from him, and they call him “Rabbi”, meaning teacher. They have an agenda of “What is in it for me?”, or a cost-benefit analysis, and that is how shoppers and most of us go into deeper commitment. They begin a relationship with him and support his ministry by giving their time, money, and attendance, moving from “consumers” to “patrons” when they ask where he is staying; they are announcing their intention to move in with him. They move to the next level when they announce to others their affiliation and get public support for the relationship. We see that when Andrew comes to his brother Peter and brings him into the fellowship. This is where the story for today ends, but the story will continue in the rest of the Gospel as the disciples come to grow closer and start to see that their relationship goes deeper, and greater commitments are made. They will break bread together and travel together. Some will decide that they don’t want to go further, as they do at every step, and in the final step, most intimate of all, they pray together, becoming one body, one will.

 

Let’s review the stages of commitment.  They are:

1)      Attraction to a person, place, or thing

2)      Shopper continues to examine and is challenged to go further.

3)      Testing for benefit

4)      Support by patronage

5)      Movement toward closeness in relationship

6)      Trusting intimacy develops

7)      Loyalty developed through combined activity

8)      Testing of further trust

9)      Commitment of lives

10)  Testing as time, circumstances, and people change

11)  Commitment of soul into union of one body, one will, one spirit.

Sound familiar? These are the steps we go through in any relationship, be it romantic or profession or faith or church. Every step of the way, we make commitments. If you grew up in the church, your parents probably had to drag you to church like mine did. Dressing up in a suit was a pain and having to give a dime out of my 50 cent allowance was a burden, but when I got to church and met friends and had fun, it turned out to be a positive shopping experience for my leisure time. I continued also because it seemed to make my parents happy and, underneath it all, I wanted to have a true spiritual relationship. But I wanted it to be handed to me - like Paul on the road to Damascus. I felt I was powerless to change, but the reality is that I did not want to change. There was a service of commitment called “Confirmation”, and I was dragged to that at age 12 and had to memorize a bunch of stuff, but I was too immature to make my own commitment because I still wanted faith to be magic. My mother still got us up and dragged us all to church. It was not bad, but it was a leisure time activity. When I went to college, I decided that church, God, the whole thing was no longer of benefit to me. I still had the attraction, but it wasn’t until my daughter was born that I decided that there would be a benefit to taking her to church. From then on, there was a series of commitments made that stretched out for years.

Today we install our Wardens, members of the Vestry and Clerk, and we commit them to their ministries and commit ourselves to support them in prayer. Our church needs prayer, our vestry needs prayer, and your Rector needs prayer. I’m not saying that in any pejorative or back-handed way, like “Boy, YOU really need some help!” Prayer is not a referral to the appropriate authority, as in “Well s/he really needs help!” Prayer is an act of love where the person who prays enters into intimacy with God and, by an act of imagination, both hold the person and their ministry in their hearts so that person knows s/he is not alone and s/he is loved by you and by God. Prayer is not an agenda or shopping list, not something we do “to” or “for”, but “with”. 

Long before I went to seminary, I was approached about being nominated for the Vestry in the church I was attending. I was attending that church first as a seeking tourist who did not know much about how to connect to this God, if there indeed was one. Later on, I signed on to the idea that I ought to support the church with time, money, and attendance because I agreed with some of the things we were doing. The Priest was having some difficulty with some church members, and a person who I knew was very angry with the Priest was sitting just down the pew from me during one service. During the Prayers of the People in the intercessions and thanksgivings, this man said in a loud voice, “I give thanks for Article XXVI of the Articles of Religion.” There was this pause and then a rush of “flip-flip-flip” as the pages in the Book of Common Prayer were turned to page 873, which assures the people that, even if the Minister is “evil”, the effects of the sacraments are not hindered; it is God’s grace that is acting, not the worthiness of the minister. I committed myself to the Vestry, was elected, and spent the first year heading up the committee called “State of the Church”, designed to deal with the need for better communication.

An 1806 Vestry of which I was not a part

Thirty three years ago, when I left the Vestry and went to seminary, my ministry changed and I vowed I would NEVER, NEVER be a parish Priest. My goal was to be a college chaplain, teach, and be a prophet without having to deal with the messiness of the church. However, I came to see that it is in the joys and even messiness of our lives that we find God’s grace. Paul in the letter from Corinthians for today calls the response to commitment a call from God. He doesn’t know anything about Christian ordination - that whole concept doesn’t come into play before 200 AD - rather he assumes that God called all of us to become members of the one body of the Resurrected Christ. We may all have different functions but we are all making commitments. Paul echoes Isaiah’s song from the Hebrew Testament lesson for today which suggests that God called us before we were born and keeps calling us to make commitments of union with God and neighbor. The Psalm for today is another song of commitment; you can see the levels of commitment undergirding each verse of the Psalm.

Commitments are not made once and for all.  They are made on a daily basis as we go deeper and work on the relationship. Each day I still have to make the commitment to love God, to follow Christ, and to seek the Holy Spirit. Each week I have to make the commitment to open myself up to hear God so that I might speak what I hear, or see, or experience, or study, or dream. Each month I write a check, not because the church needs the money – it does, but that is beside the point. I give because it helps me to go deeper. I do worship, I study, I dream, and I pray because it helps me to go deeper into unity with neighbor and with God: “Thy will be done.”

I remember a Sunday morning in a church in which I was serving when Pat announced before the Vestry Meeting that she would be going into the chapel to pray at the time of the meeting and she invited others to join her. Well, you should have heard the indignation from some of the vestry members.  They had never heard of such a thing because they thought that prayer was you telling God that so and so really needed help. They thought they were perfectly capable of doing their work without outside interference. The beginning of that Vestry Meeting was, as the saying goes, “a Teachable Moment”. 

Today we will pray for the Vestry members not just because they need it, but because we really need to pray as a way of continuing to make commitments to union with God and neighbor. A suggestion is that each of us continues to reflect on the question for meditation this week: “To what or to whom do we commit ourselves?”