Doing Our Job

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

08.31.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Romans 12: 9 - 21

Yeah, I know, y’all here in Maryland have had a whole week of school already.

But it’s still summer, still hot and steamy on both sides of the Potomac, because of course it is.  It’s the Labor Day weekend, when summer still holds sway, right before we throw ourselves back into the flow of the year.  For those of us across the river in Virginia, Labor Day means nooow we can end summer.  Maybe it’s because we’re just a little further South, and we know that trying to get things going before the swampy heat has finally left the air will just make us want to lay out on the porch with a mint julep.

No matter what today happens to feel like, the lazy days of summer, those doldrums and drifting nothings of the final weeks of August, they’re finally winding down.  We’re back to work, and school is back, and that means a different thing every year.  Because every year, we put our beloved bundles of joy into the hands of a new cadre of teachers.

And that’s always interesting.  It’s interesting because, well, I’ve known so many teachers.  I’ve had wonderful, wonderful teachers, people who’ve radically changed the flow of my life by sharing their love for learning.  There was Uncle Bob, the English teacher who taught me to hone and focus my writing, teaching me that just because I’d developed a huge vocabulary I didn’t need to aim an endless firehose of words at people.  Be precise.  Be evocative.  Trust the imagination of your reader.  Please.

For that, and for the relatively brief sermons that writing lesson has produced, we can all be truly thankful.

There was Dr. B, the high school history teacher who brought history to life, who told it like a story, rich and complex and interconnected and human.  He pushed us, and demanded the best of us, but he also trusted that we’d deliver, and respected our best efforts.  I learned as much from him as I’ve learned from anyone.

There was my physics teacher, Judy, who we all called Grumby.  She just loved science, the wonder of losing yourself in the structure of creation.  She’d get excited about experiments, and taught us to look at equations like we’d look at a really cool puzzle, and when we actually managed to solve something on our own, her delight was genuine.  More than anything, she shared her enthusiasm with all of us.  Science is amazing and fun, she’d say, and she meant it.

They had impact, impact that still ripples down all these years later, and as our kids go off to school, the knowledge that there are some wonderful, gifted teachers out there who are going to challenge our kids to excel is heartening.

There is, of course, a flip side.  Because teachers are human beings.  Yes, I know, it’s hard to believe that when you’re a kid, but they are.  There are great teachers, and there are good teachers, and there are...well...not so good teachers.

For every Albus Dumbledore or Minerva McGonegal, there’s a Dolores Umbridge or a Gilderoy Lockhart.  That’s true in every vocation, and in every field of endeavor.  There are good cops and bad cops, good CEOs and bad CEOs, good pilots and bad pilots, good farmers and bad farmers, good soldiers and bad ones.  

Except for pastors.  There are only good pastors.  Um, right?   Ahem.

It’s a continuum, really, not a binary thing, and the danger that all of us face is that we can find ourselves drifting from one place to another.  We can start out with the best of hopes and intentions.    But we burn out, and get worn down.  We can lose our way in the thickets of distraction, focusing on process to the point where we forget our goal, or becoming so target-fixated on our goal that we forget the point of it as we claw our way there.  

From the Apostle Paul today, we get some vital teaching about the point of what we do.  What matters, in the day to day work of our lives?  What makes our efforts real, and worthwhile?

By the time we reach the middle of chapter twelve of this highly complex letter, we’re beginning the end of what Paul has to say to Rome.  He’s already pitched out some wild and complicated theology, as he pulled out the stops for his educated Roman audience.  For most of the letter, it’s difficult going, demanding our attention, demanding our focus.  

From Paul’s rock-solid foundation as a brilliant rhetorician, he’s crafted an extended exploration of what it means to be reconciled to God’s grace through faith, which fills the first eight chapters of the letter.  From chapters nine through eleven, it’s a dizzying theological and historical explanation of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity.

Then we get to chapter twelve, and the whole tone of the letter changes.  “So,” Paul says, “I’ve just like, totally blown your theological mind. Catch your breath.  Let’s take it down a bit, to the here and now, to what it means when this thing is real.”

When the Apostle Paul starts describing the end results of faith, the results of our struggle to embrace and serve God in this life, what’s striking is the degree to which he just gets down to brass tacks. His writing here is as basic and straightforward as the rest of this letter is complicated.

The Christian Way, after all, is a vocation.  It’s a calling.  If we’re allowing it to be what Jesus meant it to be for all of us, it’s the job of jobs, and like all good work, you can tell when you’re doing it right.

Paul lays the measures out, one by one.  Love is a huge part of it, the main part of it, the entire point of it, love and everything it means in our lives.  It means being giving, celebrating and rejoicing in the happiness of others.  It means refusing to let the human desire for vengeance to seep into your being, and become the reason you live as you do.  Compassion becomes the measure for every action.

It means actually caring about how you live and act, knowing that living out the teachings of Jesus isn’t something you can do grudgingly or emptily.  For that path to thrive, it has to be integrated into your whole being.  It has to be authentic.  It has to really matter.

It means not treating anyone differently, in honoring every person, no matter who they are or what they do.  The wealthy and the powerful and the famous should be no more worthy of your love and compassion than the poor and the weak and the unknown.  That one in particular was hard for the folks in Rome to hear, because First century Rome was an honor/shame culture, a carefully structured hierarchy, in which everyone knew their place.  You obeyed your superiors, and your inferiors were expected to come to you on bended knee.  Roman society was a place where you were forever trying to build connections, to develop contacts, to amass reputation so that you could move ever upward in the pecking order of society.  

Nothing like Washington in the 21st century.  Nothing at all.

And it needs to be chosen, again and again, as you move through life.  Every time we decide, every time we take an action, those basic measures apply to our Christian vocation.

They also, as it happens, are the primary measures of our work in any field of endeavor.  If we’re a student or a teacher, a public servant or a business person, these things matter.  I think about every great teacher I ever had, and those measures stand.  They really cared for their students.  They loved the subjects they taught.  They were authentic, genuine, and real persons, who embraced their role but did not allow it to crowd out their humanity.

In everything we do and everything we attempt, in our every task and action, remember that this is the point of it.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.