POWER TO THE PEOPLE

May 4, 1986, 11:00 a.m. Worship Service
Jonn M. Buchanan

"Now there are varieties of gifts but the same Spirit."
I Corinthians 12:4 (RSY)

Scripture
I Corinthians 12:4-13

You know how trying it is to have a dear friend who has a favorite
story which he tells, slightly at your expense, and finds a way to work it
into the conversation everytime he sees you. A friend of mine can't wait
to retell an incident which happened in the family car around noon on
Sunday on the way home from church. He and his family are Episcopalians.
On the way home on Sunday they pass a large Presbyterian Church with a
prominent parking lot. His children often comment on whether or not they
are getting home before their friends in that congregation. It's something
of a game with them - only they always had a Tittle trouble pronouncing
"Presbyterian."

On the infamous morning my friend loves to tell me about, the
Presbyterian lot was filled. His young son said: “Look, Dad. We beat the
pedestrians this morning!"

I don't think that story is nearly as funny as my Episcopalian friend
does. In fact, I tell him that's the kind of thing Anglicans have been
Saying about Presbyterians ever since English troops chased Scottish
covenanters back across the border and up into the hills several centuries
ago, and never really did catch them. But that's another story!

He's right, of course. We are, in fact, pretty pedestrian. Our
liturgy isn't very fancy. Presbyterians have been known to have major
arguments about whether there ought to be candles in church. We call the
highest, most powerful office in our church the Clerk, and, nationally, we
invest a Tot of energy keeping him humble. We don't have bishops, and our
delegates to ecumenical assemblies start hervousty checking the exits
whenever the subject comes up. Our clergy have very little actual
authority by themselves. And once a year we affirm it in a rite which is’
Presbyterianism at its most Presbyterian - the Ordination of Elders and
Deacons and the recognition of Trustees.

It is the essence of the Presbyterian idea: It would be more
efficient to do it at some other hour. We insist on doing it publically -
because very near the heart of this church is this idea that authority and
power do not belong exclusively to the professionals, the ones in the black
robes and Geneva tabs, but the people, the ones in business suits and
dresses. It is not simply a gesture. It is not the same, for instance, as

the old Layman's Sunday concept - when nervous doctors, lawyers, teachers
or bricklayers were asked to act like clergy. One of the lions of the
Presbyterian pulpit a generation ago said that he would invite a doctor or
lawyer to preach the sermon when he received a reciprocal invitation to
perform surgery on a patient or represent a client in court. It's not
quite that clear, of course. Our intentional pedestrianism does not mean
to diminish the professional standards of the clergy. In fact, the rite of
ordination to the Gospel Ministry is preceded by a rigorous set of
Standards designed to insure that the one who presumes to stand up and
speak to the rest on Sunday morning, at least knows the tools of the trade.
There is no_reason to demean.professionalism and professional expertise in
the name of egalitarianism. The late Rosalind Russell used to tell a
delightful story on herself. She was on a trans-Atlantic cruise, sitting
on a deck chair on a sunny afternoon, beside a man who had a terrible cold
- sneezing, blowing his nose, coughing. "I think if you'll go to bed
early, drink a lot of fluids, and take two aspirin, you will feel better in
the morning," she said. The man did not respond. So she tried again: “My
name is Rosalind Russell, you know, I make movies." The man thanked her
and said: “And my name is Charles Mayo. I run a medical clinic." (Hoover
Rupert in Outlook, 10/23/83, p. 11)

What we have done today is not a gesture. it is liturgy in the best
sense, the public dramatization of a deeply believed principle. If there
is a Presbyterian genius it is here. It is a corner of the truth we have
to offer the Church catholic. The ordination of lay persons means, first,

ve Longs..with the people and, second, that everybody..has a
calling, a vocation.
ari

The first of those ideas - that power resides in the people is, as
you recognize, the pivotal concept in the political experiment called
republican Democracy, and as such one of the most dynamic ideas in Western
Civilization. It was conceived long ago, in the Greek city states: it
lived briefly in the early Christian church which was radically democratic:
it surfaced in the renaissance and emerged surely in the thinking of Martin
Luther and John Calvin. It flowered in the 18th Century finding its most
elegant expression in Mr. Jefferson's rhetoric about “self-evident truths"
and “inalienable rights" and "that to secure those rights governments are
instituted...deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed..." “Power to the People." It wasn't invented in the 60's. It's
as old as the Reformation and it's as current as its most recent emergence
in the remarkable popular revolution against corrupt power in the
Phillipines. The power of that idea in terms of political freedom and its
relationship to self determination was documented this week by a government
which intentionally withheld information from its own people about a matter
of very grave concern to them. As the Times quipped this morning, people
in Kansas City know more about the nuclear reactor accident than the people
of Kiev. "Power to the people"... it has at least part of its genesis in
the experience of those remarkable saints - the first Christians.

In first century Corinth, a Greek city, there was a tiny community of
Christians, a church, with which St. Paul carried on a lively
correspondence. Those Corinthian Christians were a very interesting bunch:
vigorous, contenuous, competitive, assertive, and as soon as they organized
themselves into something called a church - ecclesia - they began to argue

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about who was more important than whom, whose function was more critical,
and about who would be in charge.

When Paul heard about the argument he wrote a letter: "there are
many gifts," he told them, many skills, talents, abilities. God needs them
all. God gave them all. None is more important, more necessary, more holy
than any of the others.” In fact, the church is like a body - dependent on
each part performing the function it is best suited to perform.

The point is that there is no ecclesiastical caste system. There are
a variety of ways to be a Christian: no one way is more pleasing to God
than any other way. Unfortunately, much of that has been lost on the
church. Very early in its life, the church borrowed two popular ideas from
the Graeco-Roman world in which it happened to be living. The first was
that power and authority are given by God to a few select individuals - the
King, for instance ~ who then exercises it in relation to the rest of the
people. He has it. They don't. The second idea was that Greek notion that
there are two worlds - the secular and the sacred. Religion belongs to the
sacred, distinct, apart from the material, real world.

When those two ideas combined - the hierachical notion of leadership
and the division between religion and the rest of life, the result is,
simply two levels of Christianity, two kinds of Christians - clergy and
laity. Suddenly the laity - which is from a good Greek word, Laos - which
means - ail] the people of God - become laymen and laywomen which has come
to mean - amateur. And clergy - which comes from another good word, a
close translation of which is “servant" - suddenly become the
professionals. One group - sacred by function, needs to be apart, live
apart from the world in order to handle sacred matters. The other group
lives thoroughly in the world, but is now dependent on the first group for
access to the sacred.

It was assumed further that these specialists, clergy, had a
vocation, a calling, given by God. The laity were less fortunate, but
freer to pursue the good life on the basis of other considerations.

That has been a very durable heresy. Twenty centuries after the fact
we are stil operating on a slightly modified version of it. Cleray, it is
assumed rather universally, should have been called.by.God to their
profession. Professors, mechanics, and homemakers come to them by an
altogether different route. Clergy are religious specialists.: the
universal assumption seems to be that they know more about God and can talk
to God better, or at least longer, than the amateurs. And somewhere inside
all of us there lingers that old notion that to be a serious Christian,
particularly a pastor, is not to be too worldly. We still don't know
whether we're being flattered or insulted when someone says to us “why, you
don't look like a minister." Charles Merrill Smith has written a wonderful
parody of the heresy under the title "How to Become a Bishop Without Being
Religious" in which he advises that clergy will gather up in themselves a
host of characteristics which advertise - “Here is a person of much prayer,
disentangled from the soiling concerns which obsess most people. If you
have a taste for bright clothes, you must ruthlessly suppress it" he
advises, “and for recreation, develop a fondness for croquet."

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The tragedy here is not the stereotype of clergy, but the demeaning
of the laity. The tragedy is that the Protestant experiment was born in an
idea so revolutionary it would have erased the distinctions within the
people of God. One historan observes: "Every great religious awakening
has been a revolt against authority." [H. T. Hodgkin, in E. Trueblood,
Your Other Vocation, p. 35] "The ministry, said John Calvin, belongs to
the Church. The ministry is not an order of men or women, it is what the
church does. All are ministers. The job of the clergy is to serve the
church, help the whole people of God to do ministry.

At the time of the Reformation it was called “the Priesthood of all
Believers." We Protestants have been inclined to interpret that smugly to
mean that we don't need a priest. But that's not it at all. What the
Reformers wanted to recover and teach anew is that every Christian has a
ministry. "The priesthood of all" William Willimon wrote recently, "does
not mean that each person is his or her own priest but each person is his
or her neighbor's priest." [What's Right With the Church, p. 127]

I continue to believe that this idea, to which we pay occasional lip
service - that power belongs to the people and that each person is called
by God, has a vocation, is one of the most dynamic ideas around...

Consider, for instance, the broader implications. We are wilting to
believe that God calls people to be clergy and that to be.apastor is a
holy calling, But what if God is equally interested in politics, and
homemaking, and medéeivie?-"What-1-f~God's-calt-ts-to-live responsibly and
faithfully in God's world, and what if it comes to every person and what if
the way it comes is through the particular gifts and skills and abilities
and potentialities God has given to each of us? That, it seems to me is an
incredibly dynamic idea. "...That ours is God's world in all its
parts...that the way in which we grow potatoes is as much a matter of God's
will as is the way we pray or sing." (Elton Trueblood)

oe The radical message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that God really
loves this world. The world is where God's work is done, not just inside
church buildings. The policeman who settles a domestic dispute, the doctor
who sets a broken arm, the teacher who does not give up on her bored and
indifferent student, the parent patiently loving a child, or cooking a
meat, the repairman making the refrigerator work again, the typist
preparing the report, the custodian vacuuming the floor...the Gospel
declares that all of it is holy work, - priestly work, vocation - because
it is work in a worid made holy by God's love. Regardless of how you earn
your living or spend your time, it is of interest to God.

| In terms of specifically Christian witness you have far more
creditiblity and therefore power than any clergyman or woman. When the

Christian word is said or lived in the world by a layperson, it is far more
“é effective and communicative and powerful. You are front-line soldiers...

The simple fact is that many of you spend your time in places where the
important issues of life are resolved. Many of you are involved in making
life in this city - state - nation - liveable, just and human. The vital
decisions are made in your offices, healing happens in your operating
rooms, truth is conveyed in your classrooms, love is shared and celebrated
in your homes. You are called to be faithful disciples of Jesus Christ

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there. Your vocation is to be his man, his woman, in your world - which is
the world for which he lived and died.

My observation is that many of us can believe this ~ about other
people. We can believe that God has called the preacher to preach and the
physician to heal. We can believe that God has called the parent to
parent, even the programmer to program. But we stumble over the suggestion
that God calls us. The reason is that it hasn't happened for us. Or if it
has, we haven't heard it, or we're listening for the wrong thing. We have
not had a mystical experience or heard a voice telling us what to do - and
so we assume others have and that whatever we decide to do apparently
doesn't matter to God one way or the other.

Because I believe that is true for many, perhpas, most of us, I want
to make a suggestion. If I understand what St. Paul was telling the

e=<=Corinthians it is that every person has a calling,- and that God, gives

every person a gift. What I want to suggest is that God calls you and me
not necessarily by a mystical voice or mysterious experience but precisely
by the gifts he gives us, that our calling, our vocation, is to live fully
and faithfully, by using - putting to work - whatever it is God has given
us. That is the greatest thing in life: to know what one has been given;
to understand that God has given me gifts, abilities, skills: to recognize

what they are, and actually to put them to work. That's what it means to
have a calling.

New Testament scholar Walter Wink says that the fundamental question
for the first one half of our pilgrimage is "what_is.the meaning of my
life?" The question for the second one half of Jife is " bthe time I
have left, how can I makea difference." Put Slightiy differentiy, the
task for the first half of life is coming to terms with your gifts - what
you have been given - what you can do. The task for the second half then
is doing it - living out your vocation....

We have mentors, all of us, who have shown us what that means. Let
me tell you about one of mine... wife of a colleague, good friend,
parishoner. Mary had fought off a malignancy some years ago, had raised
her children and was planning her second career. The malignancy returned -
this time with a vengeance. Her time was very limited. She discussed it
with her physician and pastors and friends and family and decided that she
would not spend her time remaining in the hospital. It was a very tough
decision: none of us who were close to her was totally comfortable with
it. But it was hers. She made another decision - and it was that in
whatever time she had left, she would make a difference. In the middle of
al] that her congregation elected and ordained her as an Elder. In private
conversation with me - she laughed about her agenda and how she had no
reason to hold back because she had nothing to fear any longer and she
warned me that the difference she wanted to make would not always make life
Simple for me - or the church.

And so Mary began to speak and act with a kind of gentle but complete
commitment to living out her own gifts. She drove to a group home and
piled six mentally handicapped adults into her car and marched them into
church every Sunday and embarrassed her church into arranging a class and a
whole program. She asked questions and pushed and prodded on economic

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justice issues until she got her church's attention on the Nestle Boycott.
She wrote letters and asked embarrassing questions about the inconsistency
of church policy in gay rights. She said to me, “when I die you're going
to be relieved" and she was right. But she showed us - clearly and
strongly something church people - Christian people need to see... - how
power is exercised in weakness - how power does belong to people not just
the ones who decide to change the world and become president or the CEO or
a prominent person in the process - but all the people: the ones who are not
going to become much more than they are now... - and how each of us is
called by God to use whatever gifts we have been given - to live fully,
faithfully, victoriously.

May I suggest that there is nothing more powerful - in God's terms,
and nothing more joyful than to know what God has given, to claim it as
one's own, and to put it to work? Amen.

Let us pray: Almighty God, you are the giver of every good and
perfect gift. We give you thanks for skills and abilities, for
sensitivities and inclinations which are personal and particular to each
one of us. We give you thanks for your call to live fully and faithfully
for you. We ask the courage to answer in obedience. Bless us - in Jesus
Christ our Lord. Amen.

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