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Working Together

Sunday, September 7, 2008
Rev. Janice Palm

Matthew 18:15-20; Romans 13:8-14

I have had a prelude this summer in meeting and working with some of you. It is good now to see more of you, it is good to meet more children, it is good to at last hear the choir! I look forward to our time together and our living, working, playing, laughing, crying, being in ministry together and making decisions together. As some of you already know, I do believe that we are in ministry together. I put emphasis on we, ministry and together. We are in partnership.  

At the teachers' organizational gathering last week, Jen Bailey held up for the teachers a list of acceptable and unacceptable behaviors; Jen read the list of don’ts and then the list of do’s. Jen was offering this as a reminder for us all of how to provide a safe place, a safe sanctuary, for our youngsters and our adults. This was an Aha! moment. So this is the love Paul was speaking of! We do need guidelines for expected behavior that makes us all safe. It made the very thing Paul was writing to the Romans about in our scripture reading seem relevant. Paul gave all these rules of don’t do this, don’t do that in Romans. Don’t steal, don’t lust after the possessions of another, do not kill. The rules arise out of Leviticus; you hear remnants in the Ten Commandments. Paul then says - all these rules finally add up to say: love others as well as you love yourself.

This is a marvelous reminder as we begin our relationship together – a new year - that we love others as we love our self. Can we provide a safe sanctuary for everyone here not just those who went scampering off to Sunday School? Can we work together loving the other one who sits in front or in back or beside us, as well as we love ourselves? I mean can we really create a blank slate, and start anew right now? Can we treat each other - our own self and another - equally well? Paul puts urgency in his request. Dress yourself in Christ (that’s the key), and let us work together in love.

Our reading from Matthew gives a further clue as to how we might work and be in ministry together. In talking about the church, Matthew doesn’t speak of a hierarchy, of staff, of the paid professional, of the pastor. No, Matthew speaks of the church folk – ecclesia – as a whole. The Gospel speaks of two, then several, and then if needed the entire body of folks. Matthew says we need to be able to be honest with one another - directly. That’s how we can work together. Oh, but what a hard thing to do. We have a propensity to check our sensibilities first with a cohort/friend; counsel is helpful. But it is often our tendency to bring in a third party not just for counsel but in order to have an ally. It is much easier to offer our complaints to another one rather than go directly to the one who has caused us harm. But how much more effective it would be; how rumors would decrease, and side taking would be limited if we could go directly to another with our concern. All set? Ready? First, we need to know how one approaches another who has caused harm. How do we approach another without causing further harm? With what kind of an attitude/purpose do we go?

A verse in Psalm 149 speaks to this. The psalmist sings, ‘For the Lord takes pleasure in God’s people, God adorns the humble with victory’. God adorns the humble....

Humility is hard thing to come by today. It’s not a popular concept in our competitive world. Perhaps that’s because there is misunderstanding as what humility entails. We think of it as wishy-washy, a stripping of self-worth? Dag Hammerskjold in his book Markings reflected on humility. He says ‘humility is as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, greater nor smaller, than anything else in the universe...It is in this sense that humility is absolute self-effacement.’ Humility is not being weak. We might agree that the Dali Lama is a humble man. In fact, he often has guards with him to protect him because the simple truths he utters sometimes inspire great wrath.

Recently, Robert Morris writes in Weavings of humility, self-esteem and the service of God. He speaks of a gathering he had where he asked folks to assess realistically their strengths and weaknesses. He asked that they list the strengths they were pleased about and their weaknesses they weren’t so pleased about, and a couple of things they were striving for. After much fidgeting and fussing, and a long silence, someone finally said, ‘I guess it was because our mothers told us not to brag about ourselves. I don’t mind listing the things that I do wrong. It’s harder thinking about what I’m good at. It not very humble, is it?’

While bragging may be the opposite of humility, true humility is not the result of self-deprecation either.

Humility is the ability to see oneself realistically - as both a flawed and gifted creature - gifted/flawed as all other human beings. We each have flaws and gifts. Humility is being able to delight, as a child, in one’s skills - discovering that we are ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’ (Ps. 139). It’s like the child who asks for the salt, please, receiving it says, thank you and then successfully sprinkles his food and says in an astonished way, ‘I did that... rather... well!’

Humility is such a delicate balance between acknowledging one’s gifts without boasting of one’s gifts; it’s a delicate balance of recognizing one’s weaknesses and working through them without being over run by them. Paul says that one must not think of yourself more highly (or more lowly) than you ought. (Romans 12:3) The result of this understanding is that we can appreciate the gifts of others without feeling threatened by them. And so, there is no need then to put another down in order build our own self up.

Jesus is our strong example.

I believe we can and must attempt to humbly work with one another, recognizing our own gifts and flaws in relation to others’, focusing on our communal task, our ministries, our growth in faith, our mutual love rather than the faults of others or various personalities.

In humility, that is also how we can approach another when there is discord, humbly expressing our own concern but not in a way to uplift our own self or to put down the other.

I have been speaking of our working, being in ministry together primarily within this faith community. I also believe our partnership extends beyond our own community. This church I know has a strong commitment to mission. We have an active mission team; I have witnessed this summer how many are involved in the Habitat for Humanity projects. I know the youth recently made a mission trip to hurricane worn folks in the South. Much of our efforts, however, are geared toward doing for others. I’d like us to start thinking more and more in terms of how we can work together with folks in need - getting our hand dirty and our souls touched. Let me give you an example of a church who did that.

At a recent Stewardship Convocation in San Antonio, TX., part of our conference was devoted to getting to know several churches in the area. One was the downtown, inner city UMC. We met a busy, vital, diverse, worshiping community; it hadn’t always been that way. Not too many years ago, it was a downtown church ministering to street folk but it was a church on the edge of survival. It had a separate, relatively small, core of homogeneous church folks who had became more and more concerned about how they were going to make ends meet. They were apart from the folks they ministered to.

The church came to a couple of related major crossroads in its journey. One of them was around their history and racism. In the church, the recently appointed pastor noted that some of the rooms were named after prominent parishioners. In stumbling upon this, it soon became apparent that one such room had the name of the former head of the local Ku Klux Klan. Looking further into the church’s history, the now predominately white church was once integrated until the balcony insults became too much and most of the African Americans formed their own church when the Methodist church allowed for black pastors. The inner city church with its new pastor faced its part in racism. There was a vote to no longer name rooms after parishioners. That was not enough. The name plaques were removed. That was not enough. The church then took another step toward reconciliation; the plaque with the Ku Klux Klan leader’s name was melted down and re-formed into a communion paten and cup. That was not enough. Church folks from the downtown church then took an additional step toward reconciliation; they walked miles to the African American Methodist church carrying the paten and Cup; they offered a deep apology to the church, and held out the plaque transformed into a paten and Cup for the African American Methodist Church. Their sister church uses that paten and Cup in their communion celebrations today.

Those difficult steps of confronting themselves where they had wronged others and then moving toward reconciliation opened the church folk to further life and life-changing ministries. There were some in the Administrative Council who felt the street ministry needed to be expanded to meet the real needs of these homeless folks and to address the causes of the homelessness rather than just giving food through its pantry and giving shelter when able. Addressing the real needs of the homeless and the causes of the homelessness, being in ministry with the homeless, however, would take money and more building space. Some spoke up saying all we have are some invested funds. Others said, ‘We have no money; we should keep those funds for a rainy day when we need them.’ One voice said, ‘This is a rainy day.’

The church recognizes its past but is freed from the hold of the past. The church is in partnership with those who find themselves on the street. To help turn people’s lives around, the church expanded its building in order to provide drug, job, and other counseling for the homeless. For those who cannot afford insurance, health care is offered through the clinic that is in the church. Showers and food are provided. Within all of that, there is a spiritual component to their outreach. Worship is filled now with folks who are working together - street folk and those who are making ends meet and the affluent. People’s lives have been turned around. This is just one story of a church coming alive as it learned to work in partnership within our faith community and as it reached out into the greater community.

May we so work together and be enlivened through Christ.