Rector's Note: Shining Like the Sun-8.15.24

Even though the program year has taken the summer off, weekdays and evenings at St. Peter’s have been really busy. The calendar is overflowing with meetings about program planning, finances, stewardship, youth ministry and property. I have been in conversations about music, and liturgy, lighting strikes and insurance claims.

As I was driving in this morning, mentally reviewing all the work at hand, I was struck with a very profound feeling of gratitude. St. Peter’s has just a handful of paid staff members. Everyone else – and there are so many people engaged in running a church, let alone being a church – is not.

As I thought about you all, I was struck by the dynamism of the body that is church, the gifts offered, the time spent, the labor exerted. It is complex, systemic, all-hands-on-deck work. The word liturgy, in fact, is from the Greek leitourgia, which can be translated as public service, or the work of the people.

Here at St Peter’s, and at most other churches for that matter, that work also takes the form of painting walls, tending to planters, assessing storm damage, holding luncheons, visiting homebound neighbors, organizing worship, making nametags, buying groceries, stocking food cupboard shelves, managing tenants, taking pictures, planning lessons, practicing and offering music, overseeing technology, offering advice. That’s not a complete list of course. But read it a few times and you get a sense of the buzz and hum of church.

Volunteer has never been a very good word for a person of faith doing the work of church, in the same way that we don’t use the word to describe the interactive labor of members of a family. Disciple is a better word, a follower of Christ doing what following requires. Sometimes that work is in and around the church property. And sometimes it’s out in the world. It’s a labor of love.

And it has its costs, I know.

Sometimes I look at you and see the weariness in your eyes from all that discipleship. I’ve heard the stories of church burnout, of being overworked, under-resourced, underappreciated. I know the precarious balancing of schedules required to manage work life, and family life, and church life. Long before I was a paid pastoral minister or an ordained priest, I was a disciple and a parishioner like you. The demands of the life of faith could be all-consuming and uncompromising.

I think of those earliest Christians like Paul, who was a tent maker on the side, or Dorcas with her sewing, or Lydia who traded in expensive purple goods, all while keeping the early church going. The life of discipleship brings the buzz and hum of the Body of Christ into the workaday world.

All of which is to say that I see you. And I’m immensely grateful for you. Not because you make my job as a priest easier, but because you make the work of the church beautiful, truly a delight to behold.

Which is the reason for the smile on my face this morning, after two weeks of long days and evening meetings. Perhaps I was feeling something that Thomas Merton described in his book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander when he wrote: “There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

Describing his own epiphany in Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut he went on to write:

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed… But this cannot be seen, only believed and ‘understood’ by a peculiar gift.

That’s a rare gift, to glimpse the Body of Christ activated by all those around you. Second century Saint Irenaeus is attributed with saying that the glory of God is humanity fully alive. Whether he said it or not, I believe that idea is true. And it is also beautiful to behold.