There is a thing that I have seen that has happened enough that I can recognize it. It is a holy thing but for the life of me I can’t help thinking of it as a scary thing as well.
I saw it one time when we were on a mission trip in Saint Louis. We were staying in a church – 18 college students and me -- bunked out all throughout Dr. Fry United Methodist Church. We have been working downtown in the city – some of us at a day program for people struggling with homelessness and mental illness, some of us in an AIDS awareness ministry, some of us working with children. We drove through abandoned areas of the city – brownfields they call them – where buildings had been demolished and sidewalks lined empty blocks where businesses had once flourished and where people had once walked. We met people who lived on the edge.
Then at night, in the basement of the church, we talked about our experiences. We shared where we had seen God. And then impromptu things happened. People played games. They cleaned the kitchen. They called home. But the holy thing happened when one of the first-year students who had come on the trip sat on a table and started to ask questions.
“Why is there homelessness here? What are we doing that is making a difference here? Isn’t our work just like a band-aid that doesn’t really get at the real problems? What if God is asking us to do something more?”
It was a strange scene – a girl who had been convicted by what she had seen and who was not going to let the feeling go. A curious group of fellow students gathered in a circle around the folding table on which she was sitting. And I could see something happening – the holy thing. This girl was not going to be able to be the same after this. She was going to give her life to something that would keep her close to these hard questions. God was not going to leave her alone. And God hasn’t. She’s now working on a PhD in theological education and will be one of the best teachers I know.
I’ve seen it happen to others, too. Like for Debbie who was riding along in the passenger seat near the Mexico border as we drove from another mission site. We had just left a shelter for people who had fled to the United States from poverty and need in Mexico and Central America. She looked out the window and said, “I could see myself working here.” The Spirit told me that a course had been set. And Debbie did go to work on the border and now is in seminary. The holy thing had happened.
Then there was Laura, who sees the dignity in every person, and who went to work for improving the lives and lot of people who had no homes in northern Virginia and who spoke to our youth during our mission trip last summer. Brian, who was a hydrologist but who first went to the Peace Corps and who is talking about going to Haiti. Lauren, my campus ministry colleague, who gave up her comfortable life in Charlottesville to go join an intentional community in inner-city Atlanta that works with people on the streets and who now works with prisoners and advocates restorative justice. It happened to all of them.
It’s a holy thing – but I worry for people who go through this thing. Something makes me want to protect them from the suffering I know they will go through to pursue this thing. I want to say to them, “Don’t you know what this is going to mean? Couldn’t you just do something normal?” And then I realize – this is God’s normal. Once God gets hold of us, caution is thrown to the wind and incredible things happen.
Paul said to the Christians in Corinth, “There are varieties of gifts but the same Spirit.” Amazing things were happening among the Corinthian Christians. People were exhibiting unusual gifts and it was disturbing the community. Which gift was best? What was normal? If someone was speaking in tongues, did that make them better than others? What about teaching? What about prophecy? What about healing?
The holy thing was happening to them. They were not going to be the same. And the best thing they could do was to see if Jesus was going to be lifted up. Because, Paul said, if the gifts lead them to say, “Jesus is Lord,” then the Holy Spirit is behind them. No matter how much we worry about them, if Jesus’ name and Jesus’ work are becoming known, this is the Spirit’s work.
So this week we watched the news from Haiti and the news kept getting grimmer. A massive earthquake hits a nation that already suffers from poverty, corrupt government, and all kinds of needs. The initial reports said 10,000 might be dead. Then 50,000 then 100 – now maybe 200,000 deaths and many more injuries. The extent of the disaster is still not known. People lie in make-shift hospitals waiting for medical attention. Bodies decompose in destroyed buildings. Supplies of clean water are running out.
Many people ask, “Why? How could this happen? Why did it happen?” Maybe even – “Where is God?” But God is right there in the midst of the tragedy – alive in the people who are giving aid, who are combing through rubble looking for survivors, who are simply sitting and weeping with those who wait for word from loved ones.
Did you notice how much of the news about foreigners who were in the country focused on missionaries and mission teams? Even before the quake Christian groups were there working on building projects, children’s health, medical missions. The United Methodist Church has many different projects in Haiti. The head of the United Methodist Committee on Relief was in Haiti when the quake hit – Sam Dixon – and we found out yesterday that he was one of those who died. Highland Park United Methodist Church in Dallas had 12 people there working at an eye clinic the church has helped to fund. Many of them were injured when the clinic collapsed on them. One of them, Jean Arnwine, died.
But for all of these stories there were miraculous stories of rescue. The response from groups like UMCOR and the Red Cross has been dramatic. UMCOR has already raised one million dollars for relief efforts. We’re airlifting in these health kits next week. We’re making them this week. They’re going to the Sager-Brown Depot in Louisiana and then they’re going to Haiti.
And the holy thing is going to happen – people whose lives have been turned around by the Holy Spirit working in them are going to go to Haiti. Several of you have already talked to me about going. It is worrying. It is way out of our comfort zones – but it is God’s thing. If you’re interested in going, let me know after the service. It will be at least mid-March before they will be ready to accept teams, but there will be teams.
Now you might be under the impression that, with all these examples, what I am saying is that you have to undertake some dangerous, selfless mission in order to express your gifts for ministry. Not all these holy journeys involve giving up your job or going into harm’s way. But there is something dangerous and selfless about these holy things. It’s also freeing. Becoming the person God made you to be is always a dangerous, freeing thing.
Parker Palmer wrote in his book Let Your Life Speak about the problem of burnout. It’s not what we think it is. “[T]hough usually regarded as the result of trying to give too much,” he says, burnout actually “results from trying to give what I do not possess… Burnout is a state of emptiness, to be sure, but it does not result from giving all I have: it merely reveals the nothingness from which I was trying to give in the first place.”[i]
What we really need to do, Palmer says, is to find that place in ourselves that is dying to be revealed, to be used, to be heard from – to identify the self that is truly me and truly God’s and to give from that space. Burnout is a problem for those who are giving from the place that is not them. The true problem is that we are not giving enough from the place that truly is me.
So what is the gift that God has given you? What are the dangerous, freeing places that God calls you to? What is it that you need to give the world so that Jesus can be lifted up and everyone can see how the world is different because Jesus has come to transform it? How can you let your life speak?
Since Gerard Manley Hopkins is my current poet companion, I’ll close with a brief line from one of his poems. In “As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame,” Hopkins looks at each living thing around him and discovers that when they are being most truly themselves, they are offering the world a witness to the God who made them. Kingfishers, dragonflies – even a stone ringing off the sides of a well as it makes its way down – all of these things ultimately give tribute to God.
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.
Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,[ii]
“What I do is me: for that I came.” What is it that you came for? What is it that you are called to do? How is Christ evident in you? The more you know the answers to these questions the more it will be evident that no tragedy cannot be redeemed and no moment can be less than filled with the Christ who plays in ten thousand places. Thanks be to God.
1 Corinthians 12:1-11 [NRSV]
Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed. You know that when you were pagans, you were enticed and led astray to idols that could not speak. Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says "Let Jesus be cursed!" and no one can say "Jesus is Lord" except by the Holy Spirit.
Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.
To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.
[i] Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation, [San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000], p. 49.
[ii] Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame,” 1918, http://www.bartleby.com/122/34.html.
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