7/3/22 “Our Humble Answer to this Most Important Call” by Ian McPherson

Were Adam and Eve actual people?

Do I have to believe in the miracles to be a Christian?

Do you think that Jesus came back from the dead for real?

What does God really think about premarital sex?

These are just a few of the hard-hitting questions I’ve received during the aptly-named “Ask a Pastor Anything” sessions with youth over the years. 

If you’ve ever wondered what an inquisition feels like, just put yourself in a room with a bunch of teenagers and tell them no question is off limits.

Over the years I’ve been asked to square evolution with Genesis, to explain the virgin birth, to speculate on whether our faith would still matter if we ever encountered aliens or alternate dimensions. 

But, hands-down, the hardest question I’ve ever received came from a student who was begrudgingly attending an information session for Confirmation class. For all of you cradle Baptists out there, Confirmation is a coming-of-age course that gives youth an opportunity to confirm—or not—the baptism they received in infancy. 

This student’s question landed with the precision of a dentist poking around for the most tender spot on your gums. 

It was the question I dreaded most—asked in front of their parents no less—"So, how many sessions can I miss and still be confirmed?”

If you want to watch a 21st-century progressive pastor squirm, ask them a question about church attendance. 

On the one hand, we recognize that many of you—like many of us, frankly—carry religious trauma from compulsory church attendance in childhood. On the other hand, we have a special responsibility to keep this institution thriving. An institution to which you contribute so sacrificially, and which, we self-consciously acknowledge, also pays our salaries. 

And while we cautiously attempt to separate out the treasure from the earthen vessel that holds it—that is, we never want to confuse the gospel for the very human institution of The Church—we know that some institutional organization is necessary to keep us connected to our mission. 

So we, the enlightened 21st-century clergy, want to make sure you feel welcomed at church, but not shamed into coming. We want you know how important your contributions are to our community, but not because it benefits our egos or our wallets. 

We want to communicate how valuable we know the church is for those who participate—and what a positive contribution it can make to society at large—but not because we smugly believe in its superiority over other traditions or institutions. 

*Sigh* Sometimes it feels like threading a needle while walking a tightrope.

So these many directions are where my mind is going—all at once—as I look out into the crowd of youth now eagerly awaiting my answer to this most troublesome question. A lamb in the midst of wolves, indeed. 

They’re all anxious to know the bare minimum to get through this class, which (by the way) is notoriously the last program their parents can really make them attend before their kids hit high school and all church-related parental capital has been spent.

So, I take a deep breath.

“You know, I don’t want to put a number to that,” I suddenly hear myself say, after a beat. “But what I can tell you is this. Your presence in this group matters. When you aren’t here, we feel the absence of your wisdom. But when you show up—not just in body but in mind and spirit too—this community is made all the richer for it…

“Because this isn’t a class of me teaching you things; this is a journey that we share together, and while the class will certainly continue on the weeks you’re away, know that every single one of you, when you show up, make us more whole than we would be without you.”

[beat] “No, but really, Ian, how many classes can I miss?” . . . I am only kidding. 

Thankfully this was received as a full enough answer that we were able to move on to some of the easier questions about science and sex and the nature of the divine. 

As the conversation continued I would pause periodically, awash with gratitude for whatever grace gave me those words to speak. But the more I’ve sat with the answer somehow given to me to give to this question, I’ve recognized that it wasn’t as spontaneous a response as it seemed in the moment. 

It was the product of many years of wrestling with this tension I feel in community life today—how to invite twenty-first-century Christians into authentic connection without compulsion or manipulation. How to emphasize the importance of what we, The Church, are called to be and to do together in the world without weaponizing guilt or shame (even inadvertently) to make our shared call a little more compelling. 

I mean it was laughable, Nancy, to hear you tell us last week about the deacons calling John T. Pullen to a special meeting to address his absence from First Baptist. Could you imagine calling up our parishioners to demand an accounting of where they’ve been all summer? I shudder to think.

And as alive as this tension was before March 2020, it has become even more complex in the wake of COVID. The shifts religious communities were forced to make in the early months of the pandemic were jarring, to be sure, but the absolute necessity of social distancing offered a great deal of clarity that we just don’t have as the pandemic lingers with us in wave after wave of variants.

As the Episcopal priest Elizabeth Felicetti wrote in The Atlantic last fall, “After a year of trying to assure people that we were still the church even when we weren’t in the same room, I don’t know how to convince them now of the importance of gathering in person.”

There are legitimate reasons for needing to stay away from large communal gatherings, especially for those among us who are immunocompromised. And as your ministers, we continue to be attentive to these concerns. 

And this isn’t a sermon to convince you to attend church more anyway.

Rather, I’m trying to drill down to the core of what it means to walk the Christian life together faithfully in these days. In a season when everything, all at once, feels critically important, when the risks and costs of gathering seem so high, how do we balance the need to show up and the need to sustain our sanity?

There are big questions before us, Pullen: What does it mean to sustain an institution like this? To steward a building like this? To build a community like this?

As trust in civic and religious institutions understandably erodes around us—

as corporations adopt pseudo-spiritual business models to replace traditional religious modes of community—

as social media and other technologies keep us just connected and just informed enough . . . yet leave us constantly drained and distracted— 

we, The Church, must rearticulate why we still feel called to gather at all. 

**

Now I know I’m not alone when I say that it was Pullen’s missional clarity that drew me to this community. 

As Nancy articulated so beautifully last week, Pullen has known who it is for nearly 138 years, a people on the prophetic edge of our faith tradition—unafraid to tackle the toughest social and ethical questions of the day, whether in 1884 or in 2022.

I answered the call to come to Pullen because I believe that its unapologetic commitment to justice will keep it relevant even as other religious institutions struggle to articulate what the gospel means today. 

Yet clear as they are, our justice commitments carry their own cost. 

Because with each news cycle we are inundated with more to grieve and more to do. With each decision handed down from the Supreme Court’s theocrats, we, as Christians, are compelled to articulate an alternate vision of faith. With every antidemocratic and white supremacist movement that invokes Christ’s name, we are obligated to tell of the Christ we know, the one who calls for us to turn the world inside out and upside down for the sake of justice.

And even as we try to drill down locally to apply the social gospel to our community—our own neighborhood—we quickly realize that, try as we might, in our own zip code alone there are far more needs than we can meet. 

Our Earth Ministries committee has spent the summer discerning through some dozen or more possible new priorities, and this is not to mention their standing commitments.

Housing All, our partnership with First Baptist that provides monetary assistance for housing costs to folks in our area, gives out thousands and thousands of dollars a week. And, as you can imagine in this economy, the demand for assistance with basic living expenses is only going up. Each week we hear from more and more people who are reaching out for help for the very first time.

At Round Table, our twice-weekly meal offering to our neighbors experiencing housing and food insecurity, we hear of shelters too full for those seeking a place to sleep and exorbitant medical bills and rising prescription costs and run-ins with police and on and on and on.

In other words, while I don’t think our struggle at Pullen is the relevance of our mission—indeed, far from it—we do have limited capacity for all that we feel called to do together in the community.

Or, as Jesus says, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.” 

It is for this reason, among others, that today’s passage of commissioning is a timely one. 

Jesus’s words to the seventy hold fast to the very tension with which I’ve been wrestling in ministry, and with which many of you have been wrestling in your own sense of call in this moment, I am sure:

The urgency of movements for justice that do not need us but that would be all the better with us.

The urgency of this call to build and proclaim the kin-dom and the limited capacity of those people and institutions who answer it.

Friends, I don’t have to tell you that the urgency is real, for us today or for the seventy Jesus commissions in the text. Just look at how Christ frames the work ahead:

He talks of harvest time, a very limited window of opportunity, as well as a labor shortage for the reaping.

He insists they not dwell long in places unwilling to receive them. “We ain’t got the time,” the elders in my community would say. “So keep it moving.” Jesus doesn’t want them to waste time in places that do not accept the peace they offer.

He emphasizes a sense of danger along the journey—sent forth as these seventy are “like lambs into the midst of wolves.”

And he articulates a clear desire for their freedom of movement, requiring they shed the weight of their earthly possessions. Notice all that they are prohibited from carrying along with them—no purse, no bag, no shoes even! Not even a friendly “how do you do?” to those they meet along the way. 

He asks only that they carry only words of peace, hearts open to others’ hospitality, healing prayers, and proclamations of the kin-dom with them on the journey.

And yet as detailed as Jesus was articulating this sense of urgency, he is equally specific with affirmations for the work ahead. He says that the seventy will encounter incredible hospitality, will not go hungry or thirsty, or be subject to harm, and will even see miracles in their midst. 

So much so that they will be able to identify the kin-dom of God itself, and point it out for any who are willing to receive them and so see it emerge.

And while it’s difficult to discern just which of these many textual details apply to our call today, I am heartened that Jesus affirms the complexity of all he’s asked of those commissioned here: For the work ahead is urgent, costly, and at times dangerous. Yet Christ promises that if we stick with him, and stick together, we will see the kin-dom draw near to us and to many.

And still, these specific affirmations are only part of the good news I’m reading in this text. Because I’m holding fast to another tension this morning, between the rich details of this text and the larger themes I see emerging for us today.

You see, the specificity of Christ’s commissioning of the seventy demonstrates that we are, indeed, following the most skillful of organizers who understands fully the perils and the promise of our call.

But within his specificity there is also a broader theme that emerges, a radical spiritual reorientation to the work ahead.

For as central as our “yes” is to the work of kin-dom proclamation, our journey is almost completely subject to forces outside our control. 

Notice how Christ the organizer maps out the work ahead but painstakingly shifts the weight of change away from the disciples’ egos to worlds outside their own making. Time and again, his very specific instructions emphasize what is well beyond his followers’ own agency and control.

If we read the text carefully, we see that the seventy are sent forth by a Savior that is not them, into places they did not choose for themselves, to proclaim good news they did not author, to offer peace they cannot control, to people they cannot manipulate into receiving it, to eat and drink that which they did not prepare, at tables they did not set, in homes they do not own, in a struggle against forces they cannot fully understand, with a power they cannot take credit for.

There are forces at work much larger than their capacities alone, even when they give of themselves so sacrificially. In other words, it matters that they said “yes” to the call, but Jesus wanted to be sure that they didn’t let this get to their heads—or have it rest too heavily on their shoulders.

If we who want to say “yes” to Christ’s call today will only receive the wisdom of this passage, our egos will be freed from the weight of the world and liberated for the responsibility we must claim instead.

For ours is a call to participate in something larger and deeper than we could ever build alone. You see, in the math of God there is always a mysterious factor of abundance. We bring our humble gifts to God watch God multiply them.

What I am saying to you, Pullen, is that there is something otherworldly about this work. 

This might have been easier for the disciples to understand, given that their cosmologies were more accepting of nonhuman forces at work in the world. I have to admit, given the urgency of this moment, and the weight of responsibility I feel to make a difference, it is very difficult to trust that there are indiscernible, immeasurable powers at work within and around me. 

A few weeks ago, following the beautiful work of the theologian Patrick Cheng, I led a session with many of you in which I claimed that Christianity is fundamentally a queer enterprise, meaning that the Christian story subverts or erodes every binary that separates us from the fullness of ourselves, from our neighbors, and from our loving God.

We spoke of the ways the Christian life breaks down binaries of life/death, stranger/neighbor, male/female, even gay/straight, among many others. But the one binary I did not mention, the one that might be hardest for us 21st-century progressive Christians to accept, is the binary between the rational and the irrational.

But Jesus is clear that in this work of kin-dom proclamation there are spiritual forces greater than any one of us alone. And that means that saying “yes” to Christ’s call today requires quite a bit of trust in what we cannot see.

It means that in our solutions-oriented scheming, in our detailed organizing plans, we have to leave at least a little room for the possibility that God is working in ways we cannot understand. 

For Jesus says that those who heed his call to kin-dom proclamation will channel great power, but they will not be its source. They will be called to places they do not choose. They will have to shed whatever earthly possessions weigh them down and place radical trust in the hospitality of others.

Pullen, are we a community that is willing to say “yes” to a call like this one, to receive the fullness of God’s power even if we cannot control or quantify it? Can we see the gift offered in the humility Christ’s call requires?

When I was younger, I thought of humility as a kind of disciplining—a chastisement. But today I receive it more as a relief. 

Friends, there is so much to do, so much to struggle against, that if I let it weigh on my ego it will destroy me. And that’s just where the powers want us. Overwhelmed, in despair, tired, and overdoing it until we are burnt out altogether. 

But ours is a God who sets aflame yet does not consume. Ours is a Savior who wants us on fire for the kin-dom but not burnt out.

And this, friends, is why we gather.

Notice one final detail of Christ’s commissioning today. No one is called to this work alone. Community is a pre-requisite to the emergence of the kin-dom, as is relationship. 

We gather because that’s where the power is, not with me, not with you, but with us.

Drawing on Steven Covey’s work, the Rev. Jen Bailey puts it this way: 

“‘Relationships move at the speed of trust; social change moves at the speed of relationships.’ There’s been no movement for justice or equity in this country that didn’t start with relationship. Doesn’t happen singularly. And so, as I think about this work of social change that we’re undertaking, the transformative practice of trying to build the America that we want to see, it’s a generational project. And thank God that I believe in a faith tradition [where] my time currency is eternity. . . not election cycles.”

We gather because in the gathering we gain this deeper perspective of time and of the work ahead.

We gather because in the gathering we encounter and are mysteriously empowered by the One who called us. 

We gather because in the gathering we are reminded this commissional and co-missional clarity from Christ himself.

We gather because in the gathering we are rooted in the power of community and liberated from the grip of our egos to claim what responsibility is ours in this work.

We gather because we are stronger together than we are apart. 

The good news for us today is that we are called to participate in a movement that would continue despite our “no” but would be all the better for our “yes.”

The good news is that even as we are called to respond to the urgency of this moment, in this work we are never, ever alone—or laboring by our own strength.

We are called to conspire with forces that are nearly indiscernible and always ungovernable but are ultimately for our good. We have to trust that.

If social change moves at the speed of relationships, then by definition it is moved by forces that can include us but are most certainly outside of us. 

And I don’t know about you, but that’s the good news I need today. Because even in the moments when the gospel’s calls to action are clear, I am not always certain how I can respond to them all without completely burning myself out.

But implicit in Christ’s call is a solution to that feeling of overwhelm.

We have to shake off the dust of any lie that tells us that we must rely on our own strength to make change happen. That is a recipe for burnout and a win for The Powers.

We can take no pride in our role in this story; rather, we must rejoice that the One who authors it knows us by name and has called us.

May we answer this call knowing that our presence matters. And when we say “yes” together that we will begin to witness wonders beyond our control or comprehension. 

The kin-dom of God has come near—to us. Together. 

Amen.