Diocese of Newark Lay Professional Service
April 11, 2002
Sermon by Canon R. Carter Echols

Exodus 16: 11-21 Mark 2: 1-12

A great joy, for me, of coming into this diocese will be learning whom among you

• has the vision to imagine going to the roof when you can't get in the door
• is resourceful enough to come up with the needed tools, whether they be software programs or telephones
• is generous enough to let someone else use their office or to dig through their roof
• and who among you is brave enough to climb a ladder or to tell someone the hard truth
  

Those gifts are here, because that's how God's economy works. God provides what God's people need. Whether God's people are struggling to survive in the wilderness or struggling to minister in northern New Jersey.

Today we celebrate lay professionals, who, in partnership with unpaid lay ministers and our ordained brothers and sisters, serve as Christ's hands and feet in the world.

Using the imagery of our Exodus lesson, God has rained down upon all of us gifts for God's people…gifts that might even, like Manna, melt away if they are not used.

So today we consider our role as Manna stewards.

As the Church, our mission, our task and our privilege, according to the Catechism, is restoring "all people to unity with God and [with] each other in Christ." The Catechism also specifies a variety of ministries for the different ministers of the church.

Like Manna, there's plenty of ministry to go around.

And we know from our first lesson that God provides as much as each of us needs. Not the same amount for each, but as much as each one needs…"Those who gathered much had nothing over and those who gathered little had no shortage…" (Exodus 16:18)

How much one claims is not the issue as long as one claims what one can manage. When the Israelites took more manna than they needed, when the allocation was wrong…the manna became WORMY.

So I've been wondering if we aren't here today because of a bit of wormi-ness in the church.

Aren't we perhaps here today because over the years clergy and laity have conspired together to develop a poorly allocated ministry system?

I'm guessing that all of us here, lay and ordained, paid and unpaid, know the wormi-ness better than we would like.

• There's the worm that so many lay people don't even try to know the Biblical story because they think you need to go to seminary to learn it
• And the one that more lay people come to church to be taken care of than come to be equipped for mission
• Then there's the foundational wormi-ness that our job as church is to send people forth into the WORLD as ministers, but most of the hours that we spend on ministry discernment focus on whether someone is called to ordination in the institution.
• And the wormy feeling that lay people have when they don't have titles of respect. You know how it goes: The Rev Isaac Smith, Sue Jones, The Rev. Mary Dokes and Bill Marshall met Thursday in the parish hall.

Maybe what brings us here today, is the wormy feeling that lay professionals in the church experience when it seems their offerings aren't sufficiently appreciated as ministry.

The Church itself becomes the paralytic lying on the mat, overcome by wormi-ness and needing someone to act as creatively as did those in today's Gospel.

Perhaps lay professionals have a unique opportunity to help the church get its system unscrambled. We have a particular view as employees of the institution, but not those primarily charged by the Catechism with tending to it.

From where we sit, we see both laity holding outrageously unrealistic expectations of clergy, and clergy feeling scared or lonely because they don't want to admit they can't live up to such expectations.

And we see how, at the Church's worst, laity can become disillusioned or anti-clerical and clergy can spend all their time trying to be liked or can become cynical and sarcastic themselves about wardens, vestries and lay people.

But we can also help find a way to the roof.

In his life, death and resurrection, Jesus already addressed the fundamental problem with religious authority.

The scholar Ched Myers, in his political reading of Mark's story of Jesus entitled Binding the Strong Man, defines the healing of the paralytic in Mark as Jesus' first attack on the debt and purity code. The physical problems of the man lying on the mat would have been considered the result of his own sin or inherited sin. Jesus acted both to restore the paralytic to bodily wholeness AND to declare the man's sins forgiven. In so doing Jesus challenged the priestly hierarchy because as interpreters of the torah, the scribes controlled how sin was defined and the priests determined who was pure.

Ultimately, Jesus completely turned over the debt and purity codes. This Easter season we celebrate that His blood purified all people once and for all -freeing all of us, lay and ordained, to serve as his agents - to restore all people to God and to each other.

Nevertheless, all sorts of things and folks are blocking the way:

• Racism
• Madison Avenue's promises of quick fixes, and
• The notion that wealth gives someone value.

So God needs us to stop worrying about who holds the ladder, or whose trowel we will use, or in what order we shall process up to the roof. All of us here today, ordained and lay, can work on letting go of these concerns.

All of us here can also demonstrate our belief in God's incredible abundance...especially in the face of lingering fear that if lay people do more ministries there will not be any role left for the clergy.

More specifically, the Church needs those of us, who are laity to boldly call ourselves ministers, while in the same breath to affirm the importance of ordained ministry, and to celebrate the unique gifts of the clergy in our lives.

We also need to learn God's story and to proclaim the Good News. The former Bishop of Washington had a dream that everyone in the Diocese would be able to tell God's story in their own words in 5 minutes or less - it's still in the dream stage in Washington.

Then those of us who are lay professionals, who work for or closely with the clergy need to affirm that our value comes from God…not from the clergy with whom we're associated.

For several years, I functioned more fully liturgically in a large congregation than had any other lay person before me. One of that congregation's vergers, a layperson, always made a big point of bowing to priests before he escorted them into the pulpit, into a procession, or anywhere else for that matter. But he rigidly refrained from ever bowing to me. I always felt he liked me personally, but I think some of his sense of special-ness was wrapped up in his insider role of ordering priests around...so my mere presence as a layperson presented a challenge he couldn't overcome.

Also, we lay professionals might ask ourselves…do we who are paid feel our ministry is somehow more important than that of Sunday school teachers and wardens? Or do we see ourselves as servants facilitating those ministries?

For God has done the saving. All of us here succeed as good stewards of God's gift of ministry each time we help a child of God, lay OR ordained realize THEIR special-ness and identify and live out THEIR unique call.

Each of us knows what it is like to be on the mat needing Jesus.

So thanks be to God for ladder-raisers and mat-carriers, lay and ordained, paid and unpaid. Today we particularly celebrate the ministry of lay professionals. The Risen Lord needs all of us, working together in God's name.

"Let us bring the gifts that differ and, in splendid, varied ways, Sing anew church into being one in faith and love and praise." (from Sing a New Church by Delores Dulner, OSB)