Thursday, November 2, 2017

From Hero To Host


A Reflection for the Feast of All Saints (transferred)          All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores  
November 5, 2017                                                               Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

From Hero to Host
American writer William Stafford was born in 1914 and drafted in 1940. As a result of his status as a conscientious objector during World War II, he worked in civilian service projects in work camps in Arkansas and California. After he and other writers got off work for the day, they were often too tired from their work in the Forest Service to write, so they would get up before dawn and write before breakfast, a habit he continued all of his life until his death in 1993. One of his poems is called Allegiances which starts off:
It is time for all the heroes to go home
if they have any, time for all of us common ones
to locate ourselves by the real things
we live by.


A couple weeks ago I attended the Diocesan Clergy Conference, and our guest speaker was Jill Mathis, Canon for Transitional Ministry for the Diocese of Pennsylvania, on the need to change in the changing times. She borrowed heavily from Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze who wrote a report called From Hero to Host: A Story of Citizenship in Columbus, Ohio. In that report and other research, they pointed to the dangers of hierarchy where the Leader is the hero with the vision and who works tirelessly to bring the vision to life, depending on his followers to obey orders. High risk means high control; which works for a while in a strict hierarchical model like the military. Heroes tend to burn out, and when that happens, the people tend to flounder until another hero comes forward. It is hard for heroes to make changes because they are always fighting the war they know instead of engaging when the battleground changes.


Some of you may have seen the recent documentary on the Vietnam War. There were many heroes there, and the tragedy was that they were fighting the war they knew in the past instead of understanding a different battlefield, fighting to return to a rehashed past instead of moving to a new future.


We live in a complex world with complicated issues suggesting a change from heroes to hosts. A host gathers people from different disciplines to look at the situation from different perspectives and gets them to work together, sharing their different skills to build a new future. The issue is not problem-solving, but moving into a new future. Hosting is a four part process: (1) Hosts have to learn to be present instead of focusing on their own agenda. (2) They have to practice conversation, not only conversation with others but also the conversation within themselves, of the different parts of themselves. (3) They have to learn how to host conversations, making sure that others know that their contributions are heard and deepened. (4) Hosts have to be part of the co-creation of a new future instead of a rehashing of the past.


In the Gospel lesson for today from Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, Jesus urges a shift from hero to host. The story begins when Jesus gathers his disciples away from the crowd and teaches them the new rules of engagement. You remember Jesus has gathered all sorts and conditions of people together - some fishermen, a tax collector, a zealot - the kinds of people who see the world differently. He teaches them by example that the only way to be happy, fortunate, and blessed in the Kingdom of the Heavens, the Kingdom of God, is to be humble in spirit, to be able to mourn, to empty themselves out in humility, to work for justice, to be merciful, to train their hearts to be centered on God, to work for peace and to accept loss gracefully. This is how to live on earth as it is in heaven.


The ministry of this new community is not to be a hero of the faith demonstrating how to lead a life of perfect following of the law, but to host the Holy Spirit in the space between people to heal the world by living on earth as it is in heaven. Jesus was not trying to be a new Moses, a new lawgiver who, like Moses, does not get to enter into the Promised Land, but instead trying to be true to his name sake, for the Hebrew form of the Greek “Jesus” was “Joshua”, the one who leads others into the Promised Land. The Jesus community will continue to host God’s Holy Spirit and each other and welcome strangers into the conversation for the next couple of centuries. From the beginning, the members of this heaven-on-earth conversation were called “saints”, people who were hosts in the conversations with God and others. These saints were flawed people, not at all perfect, but they were people who were present, conversed and listened and co-created a community of faith.


However, the Jesus community gets co-opted by Rome and becomes an official religion of the state. They gave up hosting conversation and returned to being heroes pushing agendas for the good of the institution, with a strict hierarchy speaking from on high for strong internal control over the people and issuing marching orders on how to be soldiers for the stability of the Empire and the church. Stability became the norm and the future, the heaven, was pushed off to the time after each of us died. The name “Saint”, with a Capital “S” was then reserved for the heroes of this army and applied only to those in the past who had shown heroic action.


I entered the ordained ministry hoping to be a hero and I tried my best to tie into this ego goal. I spent a lot of time leading campaigns, issuing marching orders, and hewing to the party line. I tried to be the best Priest in the history of Christendom to feed my own ego, never letting go of my agenda. I spent a lot of energy covering up my shortcomings by finding fault in others while excusing my own missteps. I overworked and create a model of unhealthy living and blamed it on God. It was years before I was able to figure out that my vocation as a faithful priest is to pay attention to what Stafford calls in poem Vocation, “The dream the world is having about itself”. He wrote the final line of that poem: "Your job is to find out what the world is trying to be."


My salvation from being literally a successful “damned” Priest was to come to this place where the name of All Saints suggested that we did not need to be heroes but saints hosting conversations with God and others. We did not have a past where we wanted to be mired in a stable nostalgia but rather work together for a new future. We saw change, from the small things to the big things, as facts of life rather than threats. We were not here to solve problems but have fruitful conversations with the community, ourselves, and God. Today we rejoice with Jesus Recinos and Maricela Zaldivar as their daughter, Alaia, is baptized into this ongoing conversation.


One of the things I like about the Vestry is that we start off our meetings with people sharing answers to a question for meditation. We begin our business with listening to what God seems to be doing in our lives. I have tried to send out my sermon/reflection and post it a couple days before the service to give a chance for conversation instead of springing on you and speaking from on high on Sunday where there is no time for conversation. Speaking of that - I wanted to use the question for meditation as a way to encourage parishioners to be present and have internal conversation before the service, but there is so much noise as people are having conversations with each other. I have had to get used to not being in strict control, and it is not all bad. All Saints is the place, and the people, where and who are, as Stafford says in his poem: “time for all of us common ones/ to locate ourselves by the real things/we live by.”


From Hero to Host
Walking before a morning sun arises
we have a chance to ponder a choice
to live into the being a hero or a host
in a play that the Holy extemporizes.
Historical Big “S” Saints are heroes
snarling with defiance against devils
tempting them to surrender to revels
worldly, staring them down to zeroes.
The little “s” saint is the host to holy
emptying out all of that glory thirst
so that they might make Higher first,
not themselves, but like Jesus lowly
becoming one with the blessed meek
who rely on a power greater to seek.



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