Grafted into the Vine

One of my spiritual heroes is Pope John XXIII, and one my favorite stories about him involves a group of visitors to the Vatican who were being escorted by ‘The Good Pope’ on a tour of the “back office,” where, in addition to the wonderful artwork and beautiful architecture, the real work of the Curia takes place.

Marveling at the busyness of the place, one of the visitors asked the Pope how many people worked at the Vatican. To which he replied, “Oh, about half.”

In our day and age, we are used to thinking in terms of “productivity.” What is efficient and effective? ‘They’ (whoever ‘they’ are!) say that Americans are among the most productive people in the world.

We know what this means, right? We’ve all experienced it. Productivity usually means employing as few people as possible to do as much work in as little time as possible, where people are commodities and units of production, which can feel quite dehumanizing.

Ironically, one of the lessons of the pandemic appears to be that lots of people get more done working from home than in the traditional cubical farm. But we’ve also been reminded that we also depend on the toil of many low-wage workers who toil in farms, warehouses, stores, and health-care facilities, often at great risk with little reward.

Never was the collect found in our Prayer Book’s night-time prayers known as Compline more apt:

O God, your unfailing providence sustains the world we live in and the life we live: Watch over those, both night and day, who work while others sleep, and grant that we may never forget that our common life depends upon each other's toil; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

I am new to this faith community—and I am so glad to be among you!  Based on my experience in other places like this, I would venture to say that before the pandemic fully half, conservatively a third, of the people who would be in church or watching us on-line worshipping with us —those who want to be with us-- were not here because of job or life demands. They could be scheduled to work on Sunday or have brought work home. And it may be that they are so out-straight during the week, Sunday is the only time they have to shop, wash clothes, tend to their households, and be with their families.

God knew what God was about when a Sabbath was built into God’s time—and it was not so that we could do the laundry or go to Publix or Winn-Dixie! While this might be a change in routine, it is not sabbath rest.

St. Benedict understood this when he created his rule for monastic communities. The very busy life of a Benedictine monastic was routinely and deliberately interrupted several times a day (and night!) so that they could come together, pray, and, yes, recharge.

Without a time to rest, recharge, to tend to one’s basic needs and to tend to our inner lives, we are drawn away from the wholeness and fullness of life that God intends for us. Besides, without sufficient rest and sleep, we tend to go a little cuckoo.

There are many images of discipleship in the New Testament. Sometimes we are called “the body of Christ.” Other places we are known as “the Household of God.” Last week we were likened to a flock of sheep tended and cared for by an attentive, loving shepherd. Today we hear Jesus talk about us as being part of a vine.

In this image of the Church, we are described as being “fruitful,” which is first-century, lingo for “productive.” But not in the way you might think!

Jesus says, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine-grower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.” If God is going to get rid of unproductive vines and prune fruitful ones, how do we know we are being fruitful? How does a Christian know that she or he is being effective?

Some Christians tell us that being fruitful is the same thing as multiplying our numbers. They look at today’s lesson from Acts and say “See? Philip was making a new convert!”

But look again. Philip initiated a new disciple, a new follower of Jesus. In their encounter, Philip met a spiritual hungry person who was also the very picture of an outsider—an Ethiopian (that means African…black), who was also a eunuch (involuntarily sexually mutilated and at the same time permanently barred from temple Judaism), and an official of a foreign court—and Phillip taught him, prepared him, and then baptized him.

The “fruit” here is not found on a ledger but in the changed life of a person who discovered God’s love and wanted to learn and do the work of Jesus. And here, just as the Gospel teaches, being fruitful is a sign that each branch abides—lives—in the vine.

What’s important here is the relationship we have to the vine. If the branch is detached from the vine, it not only is not producing fruit, it’s dead!

There are also branches that live connected to vine, and they may even produce wonderful leaves in their season, but they bear no fruit. These branches will either be pruned to come back to fruitfulness and maybe even cut away. This might be a warning to we Episcopalian and mainline Christians, who have been doing what we’ve been doing for decades on end, and have lovely leaves but maybe meager fruit.

What shows off the health of the vine is the fruit it produces in its branches.

John’s Gospel was the last of the Gospel’s to be completed, and this final edit probably happened in the early to mid-second century… about 75 years of so after Jesus’ ministry. This Gospel is filled with images that are meant to help us meet Jesus as if for the first time. It is also filled with instructions and images that tell us how to be the church. Today, we have an image of the church as a grapevine in a vineyard. It is an image of relationship.

I believe that St. John the Evangelist—for whom this congregation is named! —wanted his hearers to live as a healthy branches, deeply connected to Jesus the true vine, healthy, dynamic, and growing. Jesus is saying that a fruitful church is a community in relationship.

This image of the Church invites us to be interdependent, nourished and connected to Christ together, to care for each other for God’s purpose. So how do we know if we are being ‘productive’ or ‘effective’ in the way Jesus meant? Here a few clues:

Holy time: It’s not how busy we are that determines our worth; the quality of the fruit we bear depends on the quality of our relationship to God in Christ.

A rhythm or pattern of prayer: We are a praying people: we are taught, helped, and encouraged to pray more in community.

Generosity is a spiritual gift empowering us to use everything we have—our time, talent, and treasure—for God’s purpose.

Our care for the sick, the outcast, and the lonely.  Our life as Christian community is deepened as we actively share in the essential dignity of every person God has created and gives us,

When we do works of mercy and justice, we discover the face of Christ in those we serve.

Fruitful and profound worship grows out of the way, we, as a people, and as a community—a vine, if you will—are nurtured in relationship to Jesus Christ.

But we can’t do any of this without Rest. Why do we find it so difficult to rest? Why does it take us so long to disengage? Have you ever noticed that we are only really relaxed towards the end of vacation?

Saint Benedict of Nursia, in his famous monastic rule, tells the monastics that as soon as they hear the bell for prayer, they are to "close shop" right away! Why? It takes time and effort to move from the world of labora to the world of ora. Even in the monastery, leaving the field or workshop and going to the oratory took time, and so sitting in silence was necessary to center and prepare themselves before the abbot knocks on the choir stall to call them to stand together to pray.

And that is why I was taught by my parents, as many “cradle Episcopalians” were, to kneel in silent prayer as soon as one enters the Church. I am grateful that this act of getting re-connected to God was routinized by my parents because I, like many of us, find it a challenge to stop and rest!

Today’s Gospel reminds us that the Church is a living thing and that we baptized folk are "grafted onto the vine." We were not organically connected before, but in baptism were grafted and the connected into to the life-giving sap so that through our common, eucharistic life, now we are part and parcel of the vine-- the church, the life of Christ!

Being grafted into the vine is a nurturing, generative act. A friend of mine told me about how, growing up in Appalachia, his great-grandfather grafted onto one apple tree the shoots from four different apple trees to become the most amazing apple tree he ever saw! He said that it was like going to a fresh market on that one tree!

Think about St.John’s and the rest of the Church in light of what Jesus is saying here about inclusion. Here we are, this part of the Episcopal Branch of the Jesus Movement and what do we see? A rich assortment of vines and fruit. All colors, all genders. all languages and cultures. We branches are connected to Jesus by virtue of our baptisms, and we are fed through our eucharistic life, and together we witness to the risen Christ. We branches are watched over and tended to by God the vintner. In God’s vineyard, we are at once co-vintners with God and we are the vines producing fruit for God’s work and the benefit of humankind.

This is challenging work. It will call us all to new depths of open caring and genuine commitment. The poor we meet, the people we care for, and the students we support will change us, make no mistake! It will at times feel as if we are being pruned and tended. But that’s okay! It’s what vineyards are for.

When John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council almost 60 years ago, his words recalled Jesus’ Gospel words when he said, “We are not on earth to guard a museum, but to cultivate a flourishing garden of life."

Here is a video of the Liturgy for the Fifth Sunday of Easter, May 2, 2021 at St. John's Episcopal Church, Clearwater. (YouTube)

Here is a video of the Sermon only. (Vimeo)

"Call" is trickier than it looks

“Call” is a tricky subject. We take the words for granted in the church, but the whole idea is a mine-field of expectation, vision, and self-image that can bring beautiful vision to life, motivate us to do grand things, send us on journeys of faith… or lead us to do incredible evil. To paraphrase religious writer Frederick Buechner, “[Call] is like nitro-glycerin. It can either heal hearts or blow-up bridges.”

If you don’t believe me, just wait around this week and watch the news.

This week we commemorate The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and there is no doubt that he was called… called to lead his congregation, his people, his nation, to the civil, economic, social, and spiritual liberation of African-Americans from a 400 year history of enforced servitude and oppression… and that this call cost him his life.

And this week, we’ll inaugurate a new president, whom we hope will bring out our better angels instead of encouraging what we saw eleven days ago, when the countervailing forces of fear and evil were at work when thousands of mostly white men and women turned what seemed like a protest into an attempted insurrection so that they could overturn an election they lost at the behest of a president who came to power on the very resentment fear and anger that these people have harbored since well before The Rev. Dr. King first came on the national scene in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955 and 1956.

Now here’s the thing that serious Christians, serious people of faith, must come to terms with: both the civil rights movement and the capital rioters last week used the language of “call”--- of adherence to something higher than themselves—to justify and explain their actions, to motivate their followers, and find energy for their cause. It’s just that one was after a common good and the other perpetrated an evil.

As I said, “call” is a tricky subject.

How do we know if a “call” is from God or is coming from someplace else… someplace contrary to God?

Today we hear a snippet of scripture that sounds wonderful, even whimsical, at first: the call of God to Samuel. Samuel is considered a prophet in Jewish and Christian tradition, but he was the last of the Judges. Before Israel was governed by hereditary kings, they were governed by Judges. These were not people in long robes presiding over courtrooms but were senior religious figures who governed the nation. They not only took on the rabbinical role of settling local disputes, but it was thought that they—being especially attuned to God and particularly holy—could govern the nation.

Samuel was being raised by another Judge, named Eli, but while Eli might have been a person of great faith, and wise in the way of faith, he was a rotten judge of character when it came to his sons, Hophni and Phinehas. Hophni and Phinehas were lazy, drunken, and spoiled. They were sexual predators and thieves. Worse, they thought that because their Dad was a Judge, they could do pretty much as they pleased, and they did not pay Eli any mind when he would mildly rebuke them for their bad behavior. To top it off, these two neer-do-wells assumed that they’d inherit the family business and be the next Judges over Israel. When it came to his sons, Eli was a softy and a push-over

One night, the boy Samuel—who was the only child of Hannah, who had dedicated him to God, and so was being raised by Eli the Judge—was trying to get some sleep when he hears a voice calling his name. Samuel assumes it was Eli, and goes to find out what’s up. Eli, shaken awake by his young student sends him back to bed. Three times this happens! Finally Eli, realizes that it is God who is calling Samuel, so he says to his young padawan, “the next time you hear that voice, say ‘Yes, Lord, your servant listens.’” And that’s what happens. Samuel listens and finds that he is called by God to be a Judge and a Prophet.

Sweet, right?

Well, not so fast. The thing that Samuel learns from God is that God has pretty much had it with Eli not being able to discipline Hophni and Phinehas—and worse, putting up with the evil they did in Eli’s name abusing God’s name and authority in the process! And so, Eli is not only going to lose his job as Judge but will die in the process. When Eli presses Samuel to tell him what God said to the boy, he learns his fate and says “The Lord must do what is right.” Or, as we might say today, “it is what it is.”

So… you see what I mean, right? Call is a tricky thing!

And, that is before we get to what we talked about before… that sometimes we attribute some pretty horrible ideas to “being called by God.” How many tyrants, opportunists, and even everyday insecure people fall back on the language of “call” to justify their actions?

I mean, going back to the Rev. Dr. King, how many segregationists and white supremacists justified their active evil, or their passive acceptance of an obvious evil, by blaming their actions on the “call” or “will” of God. How many could not distinguish between “the way it’s always been” and the will of God?

In today’s Gospel, I can see why Jesus liked and called Nathaniel. Because he was as faithful as the day is long… and he was nobody’s fool. When Andrew and Philip come running to him about having found the Messiah—his response was “yeah, right.” But his friends persisted, and they invited him to come and see. Nathaniel’s call came through his skepticism and Jesus knew not to shower him with sweetness but instead to bust his chops. Nathaniel could take what he dished out and seeing that Jesus knew him in a different way, followed Jesus’ call to discipleship.

But sometimes “call” takes us beyond ourselves and these very human, very ingrained, ways of thinking.

To hear a call is to take one above and beyond oneself. A sense of call is a heady thing but it can go to your head, so one must be careful. And most calls, truth be told, are not specifically religious or to a religious vocation. The other day, I saw on Facebook, how a young woman who grew up in this parish, Keri Appleman, will start her turn as a student teacher, fulfilling what her mother Shae says is a lifelong dream… to become a teacher in a classroom! To undertake this calling in a time of pandemic will be a daunting task, but Keri is up to the task and we both congratulate and pray for her as she lives out her baptismal vows and her calling.

This weekend, Peg and I have been hosted by the Rev Can himself, Father Dale Grandfield and his husband Brad, as we get ready to move to Florida this week. It was this congregation that raised up Dale and sent him off to Seminary to pursue and test his call to ministry. He was our music director, and any parish would have assumed that this was enough, but Dale knew there was something more, and this community nurtured and encouraged that in him. Hearing and pursuing a call may take us in unexpected places.

This parish undertook a call to share in the feeding and sheltering of the poor, the hungry, and the homeless, and we know this ministry today as the Ark Community Meal. But way before Easton had Safe Harbor and before the revival of Easton’s downtown, this parish took turns with other churches in sheltering the homeless from the cold. This parish community’s heart for ministry, led by the vision of Fr. Jim Gill, Janet Charney, Fr. Cliff Carr, and so many others, attuned us to listen for God in creative ways that this led not to only Safe Harbor, but also ProJeCt of Easton, Cops’n’Kids, Turning Point, Third Street Alliance and so many other local agencies and ministries that serve the poor, the outcast, women, and children, and the elderly and those with special needs. Listening to a call can draw out from out amazing, holy, creativity.

This parish chose once and for all to repent of our past ambivalence (and resistance) about whether to welcome LGBTQ persons into our parish, and were so led to embrace the ministry of Sr. Helena Barrett, the first openly gay person to be ordained in the Episcopal Church, and encourage her along with Sr. Alison Joy to form a new Benedictine religious community. After the Pulse night club shooting, we as a parish decided to proudly proclaim that welcome publicly in both word and deed.

This parish hosted a pilot of the Episcopal Church’s “Becoming a Beloved Community,” and worked with Lafayette College and other community agencies to speak out about the sin of racism, held community workshops, and decided through the Vestry, that this parish—as a whole—would be life members of the NAACP through the Easton Branch.

During my time here, we have experimented in many ways responding to the call of God in a variety of ways. Our concerts and artistic endeavors, the founding the Chautauqua of the Two Rivers, our choral scholars—two of whom came to faith and were baptized as young adults in this community—our work with Lafayette. We adopted a school in Kajo-Keji, South Sudan, and made audacious decision to tithe our capital campaign to build that school.

My experience of this community over the past nineteen years that this is a community that strives to listen for the call of God in big and little ways. Even our bike rides, our picnics, and partnerships with other parishes were living responses to the call of God to “discover, share, and live God’s love as friends and apprentices of Jesus Christ.”

Now, the time has come to listen again to the call of God. God is taking you to a hope-filled future. It is a heady thing, this business about call, so be careful not to get ahead of yourselves. Time and again, I have learned the hard way that good intentions become pavers on the road to perdition when we let ourselves think that we know better than God what God wants. So stop, pray, listen, discern, pray some more, and—above all—don’t be bamboozled because the evil one wants our good intentions to lead us someplace else. Meet your calling with integrity, inquiry, and, yes, even humor, and God will honor you with great things and trust you to follow him as friends and apprentices of Jesus Christ.

Listen for God’s call. Respond to God’s voice. Be discomfited by God’s urging. And may God go with you in all you do.

Sermon for the Second Sunday after Epiphany, Year B, January 17, 2021, at Trinity Episcopal Church, Easton, Pennsylvania. This was my final sermon as 13th Rector of that parish.

Another pesky kairos moment

There has been a lot cynical eye-rolling and snide remarking about President Trump's recent comment to the press which amounted to an attack on Governors in those states observing strict physical distancing guidelines including the closing of non-essential businesses and organizations. He said that they ought to "let" the churches be open.

Several religious leaders respectfully cleared their throats stepped up to the mic and said "we got this."

Of course, this was a typical off the cuff remark without reference to the actual guidelines the states have put out, completely unconscious of the guidelines most religious leaders have set out which are often more stringent than the governmental regulations. 

In our parish, this has meant that we have not met for formal corporate worship in our church since the Fourth Sunday in Lent... we are now (as I write this) in the Seventh Sunday of Easter. 

Those remarks raised a host of legitimate questions about church-state entanglements and the role of the president in encouraging expressions of faith, and so on. But that is not what caught my attention.

When I heard the President remark that governors ought to allow us to reopen, my first response was "Wha? You call this closed?" 

That is, after I looked up from whichever screen I was on while interacting with a parishioner or having a meeting or Bible Study or putting together worship or holding an on-line prayer service or writing something for one of our parish electronic or dead-tree publications.

Of course, and I am not the first to observe this, the problem is with an understanding of what "church" means. If you read the New Testament accounts and pay attention to history of what the Church does best-- heck, if you look at the soup kitchens, food banks, pastoral visiting, on-line & televised worship (even before the pandemic!) and small groups you discover that we Christians are a magnificent hybrid. We are hard to pin down.

That's because we, the Church, are a community that is at once gathered and sent. We are tight knit body that meets in time and space, and is also dispersed into society and the cosmos. We form institutional expressions of every size and shape--from magisterial to town-meeting to face-to-face-- and we are intimately personal and relational. 

What do you expect from a community simultaneously founded on incarnation and eschaton? Where we journey through parted seas, wander in the desert, revel in God-with-us while looking forward to meeting the Lamb at the Throne -- all at the same time! From the immediate, intimate relationship between the holy and the human; that balances a rich history, the immediacy of the present, and the vastness of unfolding future, Christians travel in the places where kairos (God's time) and chronos (our time) meet. 

So how can a virus close that?

There is a little line in the Episcopal Church's Burial Office that always catches my breath. I always try to put a little extra "oomph" into my spoken delivery hoping that it will not be a throw-away or bounce off the emotional armor that grieving people must necessarily build. It found in the Proper Preface of the Holy Eucharist for "The Commemoration of the Dead" and it goes like this:

"For to your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed not ended...."

We generally interpret this in much the way it's seen in a Tom 'n' Jerry cartoon. You know, when Tom uses up one of his nine lives and out floats a ghostly version of himself and he will be issued either a harp or a fire extinguisher.

But the Christian Hope is that in Christ all things will be filled, fulfilled, completed, and made whole. This is much more than harps in heavenly clouds; but when God, who has overcome sin and death in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, gathers to Godself all creation and finally and fully heals all the breaches between us and all humanity, creation, and God's own self. I believe that this is not just a once and done deal, but an ongoing, always unfolding experience. It is at the same time wondrous and bewildering, because we are stuck in chronos while participating in kairos. 

This epidemic has caused all kinds of disruption. The business leaders and economists who preached disruption theory as the key to innovation must be getting impatient-- maybe even eating their words?-- because right now disruption doesn't come in an explosive moment of insight and energetic invention. 

Nope. Disruption has arrived in the requirement that we do... nothing. In a society built on progress or innovation which is understood to be dynamic and in motion, being still and being solitary is at best weird and at worst painful. The novelty has worn off and we are getting antsy. 

Still, we must "sit and stay" before we can get our treat. So let's use our antsy feelings and turn that energy into something. There are active things to be done: walking, running, excericising; and also bringing food to the homebound, to soup kitchens, and pantries; making calls to the lonely or isolated; sending cards; and so much more. And there are the things we never had time to do, or could not clear the decks to get around to: contemplation, prayer, writing or journaling, painting or drawing, learning new music, even trying new radio or video experiences. This disruption of our rhythms is also a chance to re-set.

And in all this, the Church doesn't just happen, it is. We are. We have another moment of free grace-- that used to just arrive when we stood in line or was stuck on hold-- where we can choose between exasperation or presence, between impatience or appreciation. Between profanity (in the truest sense) and holiness. 

So for those whose notion of church has not yet grown past the big gathering in the big room, this is a chance to experience something more. Of course, for those who never really delved into the meaning of things, for whom life is nothing more than reactivity and chance, this will seem strange, even laughable. Their impatience is understandable. But, as Scrooge would eventually learn after his own Christmas pilgrimage, it's better that they have their malady in laughter than in more disagreeable forms. 

I can't wait for the moment when we can all gather back in our big rooms and beautiful churches and have worship with all the loud singing, proclamation, and praise we can muster. For now, though, here is our chance to revel in the mystery and wonder of living in an in-between time.

Rules are rules

She came to church every Sunday. Even long after her income was fixed, her offering came in like clockwork. For as long as she could she showed up at church suppers, studies, gatherings of small groups. She prayed. And when she was home-bound, she wrote notes to other sick and shut in members of the parish and congratulatory notes to those celebrating birthdays and baptisms. Many of her fellow parishioners were her longest, and closest friends.

But she was also a private person. Not given to announcing her needs, and always concerned that she not "be a bother." So when her terminal illness came, and hospice was called, the parish office was never officially notified. The right paper it seems was not filled out.

We were never invited to hospice team meetings. We never took part in her spiritual assessment. Our clergy or lay Eucharistic visitors were never a part of the care plan. We were not included in any call tree for when she would finally meet death.

Oh, we knew... this time. Bits and pieces. Here and there.

Her friends called my cell phone or stopped me after church or even came to the office, but whenever I called the house, her son promised me that he would let his mother know we called and were interested. We sent cards, altar flowers, along with the regular church communications. Our pastoral care team planned for her care, and a lay pastoral visitor would visit from time to time-- but it was chancy. She was a low-church kind of Episcopalian, so regular communion at home was not in her spectrum of observance. The counters tell me that her offering would arrive by mail like clockwork. But since a card or a note were attached to any of these, I am thinking that someone handling her affair took care of the offering, along with her other bills.

People in the parish would ask me how she was doing. After a while I would have to say, something like "I hear that she's in hospice, but I really don't know."

That's because Hospice was of no help. At all.

They were of zero help in allowing us to our part in the end of life care of their patient.

Twice I called the Hospice Nurse. Once I got through, on the second try. I don't know if the nice person who answered the phone passed along the message the first time, but she called me back on the second try.

I asked to meet with the Spiritual Care Coordinator, who is (I suppose) their chaplain. I have no idea of the person's credentials or training, but it doesn't matter. He or she never called me back.

I told the Hospice Nurse that I was the person's priest. That the patient had been a part of this parish for over sixty years and attended Sunday Eucharist every week. I told her that I would, first, like to visit the patient and second, would like to work with the Hospice on providing the spiritual care for their patient. I said I would make time to come to team meetings or meet with the social worker, nurse, or spiritual care coordinator at their convenience. I told that I knew that I was a "guest" in their system and emphasized that I was at their disposal. I was told that she would bring this to the Care Coordinator and to the patient's son and they would get back to me.

Crickets.

After a week. I called back. Left a message. No response.

I decided to take a crack at just showing up, and alas, I came at a time when the patient was sleeping (or "resting" I was told). I left a card. I asked the uniformed caregiver to please let the patient know I came and that I would like to come by.

Still more crickets.

A third time, I called and asked to be a guest at the Hospice team meeting. I told them that not only was I the person's priest, but that I was at one time a Hospice Chaplain, the member of a Palliative Care Team, worked on a state-wide bio-ethics panel, and was a Board Certified Chaplain.

The choir of crickets persisted.

Three days ago, the patient-- our parishioner-- died. A little detective work led us to the funeral home handling the arrangements. I know the funeral directors there, and have a great working relationship with them. They are professional, caring, and skillful at handling all the nuances of closing out our mortal lives, including the spiritual and pastoral issues. After a brief conversation where not much formal information was shared (but between us much was communicated), I can see where this is going.

Our long-time parishioner, with a lifetime of connection, story, service, and worship, will probably not be buried out of the parish and it is up in the air as to whether or not her pastor will even be invited to preside.

What's worse, is that a community (this parish community, and God knows how many of her community of friends) will be left to work out their grief solo, in the dark. The curtain of another life quietly drawn to a close with little or no comment or recognition.

And the place where she came to give her living meaning, hope, purpose, comfort, and direction, will have no opportunity to listen to their stories, share our story with those she loved, and her Gospel story will be will be left un-said at least in the context of a funeral.

Crickets.

Part of this is completely in keeping with our member's way of being. She was a quiet person, unfailingly polite, who never wanted to be a bother to anyone. I think that the idea of anyone making a fuss over her would seem mortifying. Still, I remember the Prayer Book she brought to church every week. Not only was it hers, but it was filled with old bulletins, pages torn out of the Anglican Digest with some prayer or meditation that meant something to her, prayer cards and Mass cards from other funerals, the ever present copy of this quarters Forward Day-by-Day behind the inside front cover. When I told her how to preserve the ribbons with dabs of clear nail polish, she told me of her sure-fire method of getting wrinkles out of purificators from her altar guild days.

So the sound of all those crickets at the end felt particularly painful and sad to me.

And, I'm betting dollars to little round doughnuts, that the spiritual care was being left to the wishes, whims, and biases of the primary care giver, who (as luck would have it) was estranged from anything spiritual let alone religious.

Imagine having a Jewish patient being ministered to by Catholic priest or a Scientologist because that was the affiliation of the primary care nurse or the relative of the patient doing the care. Imagine if the doctor decided that only Mormons or Methodists would be allowed into the patient room. That would be wrong, right? Well, I think that was what was happening here. And not maliciously, but because no one was skilled enough to a proper pastoral and spiritual assessment.

Usually, in my experience, the whole range of the ways people frame their meaning and spiritual life is boiled down to two questions: "Do you have a church?" and "Do you want to call your priest/pastor/rabbi/imam right now?" Two questions designed to elicit a range of unpacked feelings and no action.

Which is why I had this awful feeling that big part of this person's end-of-life care was being left out.

A big chunk of this, though, is my fault. Not in the actions of me or this parish in the months and weeks leading up to her death.. We did all we could and then some to care for our sister in Christ. No, it's my fault because a long time ago I was apart of a committee that helped create rules to formally protect a patient's privacy when they are in the healthcare system. In the 1990's, there was this big inter-disciplinary committee meeting in Washington, DC, called together to form rules and regulations regarding patient privacy and confidentiality.  I was there. Among the handful of pastoral caregivers in the group.

We were not a united voice, though. One person wanted to lobby for allowing chaplains and pastors to bill for their services (a non-starter), others wanted to protect patients from being proselytized, others wanted to allow free access for evangelists, there were ethicists, ritualists, and God-knows who else all wanting to have their piece of the regulatory pie. In the end,  there were two factions: one was the pastor-is-part-of-the-care-team faction and the other was the privacy-at-costs-faction. We came up with compromise rules that basically said that it's up to the patient, no matter how sick, or their family to contact the pastor and that the parish pastor could make no record of their work and no contact with the rest of the care team unless a particular hospital, hospital, or agency thought of it. Which they never do.

Later on, working out of my hospital in West Virginia, I was part of another interdisciplinary team that developed never-before-envisioned protocols for care at the end of life that covered everything from pre-hospital care, to pain management, and spiritual care. And we managed to include the clergy in the congregations with both effectiveness and efficiency.

So, when you add that to the hours of clinical training and patient care time... well, let's just say that this ain't my first rodeo.

Now I get the privacy issues loud and clear. When I was clinical chaplain through the 80's and 90's, mainly in small-town community or Catholic hospitals, and also in a hospital owned by a big for-profit corporation,  I had to deal far too often with staff who loved to gossip about patients, or people they knew who came through our doors. I once had to fire a staff member for blabbing intimate medical details of persons she encountered. I don't regret doing that for one second. But loose lips sinking ships is not what I am talking about here.

What I am talking about is the unintended, but perfectly foreseeable, consequence of the current state of the HIPPA rules. And that is the culture of circling the wagons and the need for a variety of reasons of limiting information to the chosen few.

There is a kind of gnosis at work under the guise of patient confidentiality that says essentially that if the person can't charge for their time, or is not paid by the caregiving agency or institution, then they can't get in. Even if their work has a direct impact on the patient's well-being.

I have a strange feeling that if way could be found a way to turn the ordinary pastoral care of clergy, lay visitors, and Eucharistic ministers into a billable service from which the healthcare entity could take a cut, then we'd have no trouble getting our foot in the door. For all the talk about "caring for the whole person, body, mind, and spirit" that hospitals and hospices love to advertise, it is far too easy to boil it down to billable services and patient volume. You know... "no margin, no mission!"

By the time I finish writing about this, the chart will have been completed, the charge-master closed as soon as the last reimbursement is received, and the next patient will have been admitted.

But the things that pastoral ministry cares about-- helping a person make meaning out of their living and their dying, sitting with the person as they recount some small (but vitally important) piece of their story, the permission to admit that illness is a pain in the ass, and that death is scary to a person who will just accept the observation and not try to fix it, and above all the ability to take part in the ancient rituals that humans have developed over millennia of experience and wisdom will not have taken place.

In addition, no one will process with the family and loved one the connects and the disconnects between the dying persons way of making meaning and their own. No one will look at the preferred or hoped for way of dying with the actual experience. No one will walk the person through the work of making meaning out of  can be a concurrently beautiful and terrible experience.

Sure, I get that the caring son who never left his mom's side was a dyed-in-the-wool atheist who never fully understood why his mom wanted to go to church every week while he sat in the car reading the Sunday New York Times. I even admire his faithfulness in bringing her! I wish that I had the chance to listen to his story of how he came to his spot and how that intersected with the care for his dying parent.

But rules are rules, you know.

Here's what we miss in our permission-first culture. It's the wonderful secret I know from years of doing rounds and popping in on parishioners and from hanging out with the retired guys who meet once a week for breakfast at the diner: holy stories happen.

You can't engineer them or plan them. The technique is the discipline not to have any technique.

There is wisdom in those stories. And Gospel in those encounters. There is holy history in the everyday encounter between the holy and the human... stories of change, of hope, of opportunities missed, and transformation experienced, of relationships broken, fizzled out, healed, or persisted over years.

Meaning is made and revealed when conversation happens. Anton Boisen, the founder of modern Clinical Pastoral Education, knew what he was talking about when he said that the people he encountered as a chaplain were "living human documents." People have stories to tell. People are stories that are waiting to be told and shared. And they come out with a wonderful spontaneity, if only you have the ears to listen.

I believe that everyone has something to celebrate and something to confess. Everyone needs affirmation and absolution. The trick is that it has to happen in every person's own time and in every person's own language. Now matter how traditional or how out-of-whatever-the-faith-box a person might be, they need the space, permission, and time to process. And a skilled practitioner of the pastoral arts helps that along tremendously.

I believe that in the telling and hearing of these stories, healing happens. And I believe that someone who can hear and appreciate and bless those stories in acknowledging that those moments were holy and that God (however they know God) is in both the living and the telling. I believe that this happens whatever the person's tradition might be, it happens for people of faith or no-faith, because we are who we are.

And the rituals that we are empowered by our traditions to lead... the prayers, the sacraments, the rites (even the last ones)... or, for that matter, the ones that we invent, are part of this artistic and symbolic language that points us to the holy. They help us navigate the awesome, unknowable, and tangible mystery that is life and death.

The process works best if the practitioner-- chaplain, priest, rabbi, imam, nun, LEV, lay reader, whatever-- can get in the room and actually do their work! So many of us train and practice and work to be present for, and sometimes facilitate, the person-centered process of spiritual care, and yet.....

All too often, when I have been called in it has been after the person has died. Perhaps for last rites, perhaps "to say a few words" at a memorial, or to preside at the funeral mass. I don't denigrate that work one little bit. It is an honor to be present to guide and help folks make meaning in those moments. It is a pastoral companionship of it's particular pattern and form.

But way too often, the work of doing that with the person, before they've died, and accompanying them--and their loved ones--through that final passage is denied and people are left alone to make what they will from that time, because, you know, rules are rules.

In the end, as a colleague puts it, God always shows up! The holy happens. Even as we bumble our way through protocols, policies, procedures, and other secular rituals of modern health care, divine caring happens. I am so impressed with the dignity and care of the countless paramedics and EMTs, nurses and allied health professionals, doctors and physician assistants, unit secretaries and admissions clerks, Hospice and acute care professionals, who extend towards the dying and their loved ones remarkable presence, dignity, skill, and compassion. I firmly believe that God's love is concretely expressed in the work of all these folks.

But imagine, just imagine, what it might have meant to that person to not only see her (or any) pastor, but to have the freedom to say anything she wanted from "can you pray for me" to "here's my story" to "get the hell out!" To have a person trained and tuned to listen and to accompany them as they make meaning of their life's story in the closing chapter of their living. Imagine what it might mean for the family to have a person who is at once a trained, experienced pastor, and a person conversant in medical ethics walk with them as they make some of the most difficult decisions they will ever have to make.

I'm just sad when once again, that me and this faith community were not given the chance to do our part, to bring a lifetime of experience and even just a smidge of that millennia of wisdom, to the bedside of another dying parishioner because some form wasn't signed, some protocol not met, some third party payer decided it wasn't reimbursable, and some administrator decided that there were other fish to fry.

Herding cats in the kingdom of God

If you were to ask me to choose the 100 best TV commercials of all time, do you know what would be at the very top of my list? It would be an ad that first appeared in Super Bowl XXXIV in 2000.

Picture tough, dust-caked cowboys riding the range. They are on a drive through the desolate, wild, open prairie. From their horses they shout, whistle and use their lariats to bring their herd home. The ad opens with a young cowboy standing next to a Conestoga wagon, holding up a picture. “This is my grandfather,” he says. “He started herding cats when he was 15.”

Yes, these cowboys are herding cats.

“Anyone can herd cattle,” one of these cowboys says. “But keeping ten thousand half-wild short hairs together… is about the hardest work a man can do.”

This ad works because it takes a time honored image that we all know and with wonderful details like a little yarn, a sneeze, and a lint roller---not to mention dozens and dozen of cats--and turns it all upside down.

Sort of like taking an historic parish founded by a famous industrialist located in a town re-named for a famous athlete and then raising up for that parish an all-female leadership team.

The American cowboy is an archetype for us is because he embodies the free individual. 

Alone, against the odds, he by himself endures and brings the herd home. If there is camaraderie, it is a companionship of rugged individuals. The archetype appeals to us precisely because we can’t imagine ourselves being part of a herd.

We may like groups but we are nothing like cattle or sheep… or so we tell ourselves. We listen to our own beat, to many beats, all our own. We like to go our own way, do what we think best, maybe we’ll tell people what we’re up to or maybe not. We don’t live on the prairie, but we do think of ourselves as rugged individualists.

To tell you the truth, we are a tough flock to lead.

So when we hear someone say that parish life is “like herding cats” we all know what that means. None of us wants to be mere cattle…let alone sheep!

Which makes me wonder:  Why would the early church remember today’s Gospel image of sheep and, most of all, why would they remember Jesus calling himself the good shepherd? 

For one thing, I think they remembered that Jesus stood up to Israel’s religious leaders about their lack of leadership. One of the things that Jesus calls out, is the temptation to think of ourselves as so unique, so special, so “apart” that it cuts us off from the world God has placed us in.

The Gospel of John is also challenging some of the leaders of the early church. He reminds those "pastors" (another word for shepherd) not to fail their infant communities by putting themselves on pedestals or preaching a gospel they did not attend to themselves.

We like to think of the church as being one family, one unit with a single mind and purpose and yet we know from our experience that being in the same building at prayer does not necessarily mean that we are one flock with one shepherd.  At times we are like a herd of cats.

Yet somewhere in between the docility of sheep and the independence of cats, there is set before us the truth of who we are and what we need. We all need direction, purpose, and community. We all need, heed, and follow a good shepherd.

Now before you start giving Rebecca the side-eye glance and expect her to have all the answers, remember who the good shepherd really is.   

Jesus is the good shepherd by showing us a way. Jesus is the good shepherd because of his unity with God. Jesus is the good shepherd because through his life, death and resurrection each and every one of us has new life and a new way of being. Jesus redeems and shapes us to be something more than docile sheep or independent cats. 

In our baptism and our profession of faith we gave ourselves to the good shepherd and began to follow him. He guides us and protects us and teaches us.

In our prayer and worship and study, we learn to hear Jesus’ voice over the din and distraction of the culture we are in.

In our community, we learn to recognize Jesus at work in and through us. We discover how Jesus protects us and prepares us to face the assaults and ambiguities of everyday life through our sacramental and common life, and in the ways we listen and support one another.

In our witness, we see people without hope or purpose or who doubt that anyone will welcome them into any fellowship, and we give them shelter, and nourishment and care.

As followers of the Good Shepherd, who is at the very same time the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, we are members of a different kind of community. We follow a shepherd who serves. Who lays down his life for the sheep. Who seeks us when we are lost. Who leads us to new life and new community.

And in following Jesus, the Good Shepherd, we find that the true nature of the church lies somewhere in between the docility of sheep and the independence of cats. The more we follow Christ, the more we, together and individually, become like the One we follow.

If herding cats is one of my favorite ads, one of my favorite quotes about mission comes from Pope John XXIII. He said about the Church that “We are not on earth to guard a museum, but to cultivate a flowering garden of life.”

In looking around this church, and yes I’ve been one of those tourists, there is a little sign right at the top of the grand outdoor stairs that no one uses because of the elevator. It tells people that you are a “free” church. That is, when this place was built, Mr. Packer decided not to charge pew rents, so instead of the wealthiest always getting the best seats in the house, anyone could get the best seat!

Once upon a time, my own parish of Trinity, Easton, had a church fight over abolishing pew rents. It was so fractious that the Easton Express Times reported on how the police were called to calm everyone down. The Bishop had to take the train from Reading to sort out which of the two vestries (yes, two!) that were elected that day was the real one. Those were the days, lemme tell ya!

That little sign on your door says you are open to all. It says that for all the beauty and all the grandeur, despite the Tiffany windows and the Mercer tile, this was to be a church open to all people. Which is why that even though the big mansions are over there, this church was built where all the tradespeople, workers, railroaders, merchants, and coal-crackers lived.  

But, as the sign also indicates, free is not cheap. There are things we have to do, and that means more than knowing when to stand, sit, or kneel.

Accepting the free gift of grace means that our lives will change in unexpected ways. Which is why the church is most obviously the church when we choose to model ourselves on the good shepherd, so that we can together share in the good shepherd’s care and longing for the world. When we follow Jesus, the good shepherd, we are also the ones who with Jesus give ourselves to the world he loves. As disciples, we follow Jesus so that we may become more and like him both by ourselves and in our common life.

In taking on Rebecca as your priest in charge, especially after accompanying her through so much of her journey, you might think that you are taking on the familiar. You might be tempted to do what you've always done with even greater fervor, as crazy as that sounds.

The truth is that being the body of Christ at once grounds us and is unpredictable. It is full of challenge and change. Living the Christian life is always on-the-job training (no matter how long you’ve been at it), learning and doing the work of Jesus, being a disciple of Jesus in community is demanding. 

The good news is that Jesus is our shepherd. Jesus has made into something more than a herd of individual cats and something better than flock of docile sheep.

All of us in this parish, in this diocese, in this community, in this time are adopted into Christ's body, and are guided by of the Holy Spirit and living in sacramental community, so we are together discovering, sharing, and learning what it is to follow him. And in this moment, in this place, we are Jesus' friends and apprentices, inviting everyone around us into new, life-giving life with him.

It may feel like herding cats, but we have a direction, a place and a purpose because we hear and follow the Good Shepherd, who knows us and calls us each by name.

Preached at the celebration of new ministry of the Rev. Rebecca Parsons-Cancelliere at St. Mark and St. John Episcopal Church in Jim Thorpe, PA on the Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year B, April 22, 2018.

On the Roles of Vestries and Clergy

The Vestry is a learning, praying community of spiritual leaders
who oversee, plan and guide the ministry of the parish.

Background note: This was originally posted on the list-serve of the Diocese of Bethlehem, then known as “Bakery," in response to a conversation thread about the role of the clergy, Vestry, and congregation (through the congregational meeting). I cannot remember what the original situation was, except that what was being discussed was a lack of clarity among the members of the Vestry and, perhaps, the clergy of a parish as to the proper role of the Vestry. This lack of clarity was apparently causing a persistent “pinch." 

I wrote this post because the thread revealed many questions about the appropriate roles of vestry, clergy, and congregation in an Episcopal parish, which I found to be fairly common in the many parishes I've served and in others that I have come across. 

Canon Bill Lewellis published this on the blog DioBeth newSpin on August 24, 2014.

There is a tendency in this country to run Episcopal Churches according to a congregational (where the whole congregation makes decisions) or a Presbyterian model (where elected committees and officers make the decisions) and in both these the clerics find themselves in the role of preaching consultants or maybe as the hired help. Sometimes, in the name of promoting lay ministry, the cleric sets aside his or her appropriate role. Other times, the Vestry (or maybe one of the officers) has taken on the corporate, material needs of the parish to the exclusion of the pastoral, spiritual, and mission work of the congregation. The situation you described is apparently one where the lay leadership seems to have fallen into one of those models to bad effect. It is not an uncommon problem.

There is an equal tendency to organize Episcopal Churches along Roman Catholic lines, where the priest is in total charge and the vestry and lay leaders exist solely to raise funds, maintain the property and carry out the priest's vision. This can have the effect of holding lay leadership back from taking their full place in the life of the church. 

We Episcopalians, on the other hand, strive for that elusive via media.  Unlike our Catholic or Reformed sisters and brothers, we assume a partnership between clergy and laity. In the Episcopal Church, the congregation elects the vestry to work alongside the Rector as both partners in and leaders of ministry and mission. This works on two axes.

The first axis is procedural. The Rector has complete use of the property for mission, and complete oversight over worship including music and has final responsibility for Christian formation.  The Vestry has control over the purse strings, and yet is canonically charged to see to the materials necessary for the worship and mission of the church. That "check and balance" suggests that the process works best when the parties work together as partners.

The second axis is pastoral or theological. We assume in the Episcopal Church that vestry members share in the spiritual and pastoral leadership of the parish with the clergy. We don't specify this in the canons but best practices show us that Vestry members who attend worship regularly, give proportionally and sacrificially to the work of the church, and participate in both the formation and outreach of the parish will make the best vestry members. A well-functioning Vestry grounds their deliberations and decisions in prayer and study.  Vestry members share in the spiritual leadership of the parish along with the priest.

So the mission of the parish belongs to both the Rector and the Congregation through the Vestry. In our tradition, it is the Vestry and the Clergy working in concert that oversees, directs, manages, and envisions ministry.  And we do this in concert with the community of the diocese through the ministry and oversight of the Bishop. 

The Rector is not an employee of the congregation but is called to the congregation. The call is made and ratified by both the Bishop--who is the chief pastor of a diocese--and the Vestry. While the Rector has tenure, she or he still represents the Bishop to the congregation, just as the congregation is the living presence of the diocese in the community. The relationship in a parish is a three-way covenant between bishop, priest, and vestry. 

The rubrics and content of the celebration of a new ministry in the BCP describes this relationship very clearly.

When there is no resident Rector, the Bishop fills that role. The terms "vicar" means "representative" and in a mission church, the vicar represents the Bishop who is the Rector of that parish. In parishes that have priests-in-charge, the same applies. The difference is that missions are generally not self-supporting parishes while congregations that have priests-in-charge are generally self-supporting but without a Rector. 

The idea of a priest-in-charge is a fairly new creation of General Convention and (if I am not mistaken) was intended to give canonical authority to interim clergy, who have been utilized in the Episcopal Church for many years but, before this canon, were less than rectors but served longer than supply clergy. While the canon has solved some problems, there have been other applications which have sometimes worked well and other times not so much.

More and more, the Priest-in-charge canon has often been used to shorten the search process...a priest-in-charge is appointed by the Bishop with the Vestry's approval of a letter of agreement; and, if all goes well, then the Vestry might nominate and elect that person as Rector. There is considerable debate about the utility of using this canon in this way since, generally speaking, interim pastors do not become Rectors, but many Priests-in-charge do. In any event, the status of a priest-in-charge is similar to that of a vicar: they represent the Bishop (who is Rector in name or in effect) and serves at the pleasure of the Bishop. With both the Vicar and Priest-in-charge, the appointing authority is the Bishop and the person is not "called" in the same sense as a Rector.

Using long term supply, especially without a specific letter of agreement or with mission plans and detailed accountabilities has all the pitfalls that Scott mentions and, IMHO, tends to freeze a parish in place because they might get used to moving from Sunday to Sunday. Any congregation of any size and clerical status can slip into survival mode, for sure, but this might encourage that perspective.

Here are some very good resources that describe this in the Episcopal context very well:

Beyond Business as Usual by Niel O; Michell from Church Publishing. Michell offers a way forward for Vestry's to become learning communities and to take their place in the mission and spiritual leadership of a parish alongside their priest.

Back from the Dead: The Book of Congregational Growth by Gerald W. Keucher also from Church Publishing. Keucher has brought together most of the best thinking about congregational development and put it together with his experience in the stewardship and management challenges of parish ministry.

I also recommend another book by Keucher that helps vestries and clergy understand their proper relationship: Humble and Strong: Mutually Accountable Leadership in the Church.

Finally, I appreciate the bringing together of Benedictine spirituality and intelligent organizational wisdom found in Bob Gallagher's Fill All Things: The Dynamics of Spirituality in the Parish Church from Ascension Press. I have trained with Gallagher and have found his approach to be most useful and accessible to congregations.