Yesterday in church I gave a "Lay Stewardship Homily" - the first of three homilies given during stewardship season. People generally take them as an occasion for an extended self-introduction. I did less, and a bit more. Some excerpts:
You might think standing before you would come easy to me, since I’m a professor – a professor of religious studies, no less. It doesn’t, for just those reasons.
As a professor, I’m a sort of member of clergy at my college. As a director of programs, I suppose I’m even some kind of bishop. I come here, to Holy Apostles, to step out of that. I come here not to teach. Not to be an expert, an authority, not to be in charge. I come to be part of the community of learners, a community where you can say you don’t know something and be taken at your word, that there are things you are struggling to make sense of and be believed.
It feels even weirder for me to be up here — it feels downright dangerous! — because I’m a professor of religious studies: I talk about religion all the time, analyzing it from historical, sociological, psychological, ethical and even aesthetic viewpoints. But speaking as a religious person is hard. In my classes I give voice to all sorts of religious types and experiences, as well as to skeptics and atheists, part of a pedagogy which confronts every party line – believing or unbelieving – with “inconvenient facts,” and tries to make every view confront the humanity of those who don’t share it. As a result, even when speaking for myself I feel I’m speaking as some kind of person; even when speaking as an insider, I’m speaking from the outside, or to it. ...
Here at Holy Apostles I’ve experienced the truth of many things I’ve studied and taught: the satisfactions of community, the power of liturgy and of collective prayer, and even of singing – of singing one’s part in harmony! (When I attended an Anglican church in Australia a few years ago, I bridled at the choir’s monopoly of harmony – even for hymns, the rest of us got only the melody line.) Yet it’s only when the congregation sings in harmony some of the time that you can fully hear the beauty of its singing in unison at others, as – especially – when we sing:
Now this is a stewardship homily, and I’m supposed to remind you of all the ways you can mix your time, talent and treasure with this place. When I had only been here a few weeks – I arrived in the Fall of 2002 – Bill Greenlaw took me out to lunch. How did I want to serve? Surely I wanted to teach here, too? Absolutely not, I said, I come here to be a lay person, something I don’t fully know how to be. But of course, as my still Catholic self needed reminding, lay people can do, and do do, a lot in an Episcopal church. We reap the harvest of many people’s talents, lay and ordained, and are the richer for it – richer and, I’ve learned here, we hear more of what God has to say to us. When we preach inclusion we mean it, because our life together lets us experience its gifts all the time.)
What I’ve found myself doing here is ushering, lectoring and pledging. Each is meaningful in a different way. I won’t say much about ushering; it turns out it’s rather like being a professor of religious studies ... Let me try to say something instead about being a lector, something which – perhaps surprisingly - is entirely different from being a professor.
I had no idea how different lectoring would be until I tried it. Not to be grandiose about it, but it filled me with fear and trembling (especially when I got to read the passage in Philippians where those words appear, "fear and trembling"!). In being a lector you have a totally different relationship to the text than you do as a teacher—even if you’re a teacher who sometimes takes people through passages from the Bible, or through Biblically formed texts like, say, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. As a lector you don’t get to choose the piece of scripture you’re reading. You don’t introduce or contextualize it, you don’t paraphrase, you don’t interpret it. Sure, in reading it aloud you are interpreting it. But I found as I prepared that I was trying to do something different: to let the text speak, to let it say more things than I knew were in it. (We all know that scripture says different things to different people, and even to the same person at different times.) As a lector I try to make the text significant, relevant, available; the purpose isn’t to commend my interpretation of it. (Often—I can say this here!—I don’t know what I’m reading. The more times I read it, and read it aloud, the less I understand. And I admit I’ve had a hard time with some of the texts I’ve been given, like the insistence that not one Egyptian survived the closing of the Red Sea over Pharoah’s army, not one.) But even then, I’m trying to be there for the reading, to give it voice, make it available. It’s a humbling, but also exciting experience.
The last thing I do is pledge. Why I pledge is related to this sense of the privilege I find in lectoring, the privilege of making something available whose meanings I can’t all master, and perhaps don’t have to. Supporting this church is satisfying in a similar way. Let me try to explain by way of a digression. As some of you may know, I’ve created a class at school called “Religious Geography of New York.” In it students and I consider theories of religion and space, which generally assert that the sacred is and must be something apart, a refuge or respite – and then confront these theories with the robust and amazingly mobile religious life of godless Gotham. What was a church yesterday is a temple today, while its congregation has moved uptown, or dispersed to the suburbs, or taken over a movie theater. (Episcopalians don’t move as quickly…) But this tumble of religious communities and spaces doesn’t undermine the religious, the way theorists of religion and small-town conservatives think it must. Rather, it gives religion new form and force and suppleness. In the back of my mind as I sing the praises of urban religion is always this space: this church, this soup kitchen, this shul, this performance space … this church. Its multiple lives deepen its significance for me. I love that it can mean more to more people than I am capable of understanding. ...
Holy Apostles is a very special place, where special and important things happen. I’m not master of all of them, nor need I be. Indeed, I come here to cultivate the version of myself that lives without mastery, in searching and wonder and community and service. I’m grateful to all of you for what you give to help this place be all the things it is, and for helping it maintain the openness which assures it will be even more things in the future.
Not sure very many people got all I was trying to say (such as the implied parallel between the Episcopal Church's inclusiveness and singing in harmony), but some did. And I did - it was good to be forced to try to put these things into words.
You might think standing before you would come easy to me, since I’m a professor – a professor of religious studies, no less. It doesn’t, for just those reasons.
As a professor, I’m a sort of member of clergy at my college. As a director of programs, I suppose I’m even some kind of bishop. I come here, to Holy Apostles, to step out of that. I come here not to teach. Not to be an expert, an authority, not to be in charge. I come to be part of the community of learners, a community where you can say you don’t know something and be taken at your word, that there are things you are struggling to make sense of and be believed.
It feels even weirder for me to be up here — it feels downright dangerous! — because I’m a professor of religious studies: I talk about religion all the time, analyzing it from historical, sociological, psychological, ethical and even aesthetic viewpoints. But speaking as a religious person is hard. In my classes I give voice to all sorts of religious types and experiences, as well as to skeptics and atheists, part of a pedagogy which confronts every party line – believing or unbelieving – with “inconvenient facts,” and tries to make every view confront the humanity of those who don’t share it. As a result, even when speaking for myself I feel I’m speaking as some kind of person; even when speaking as an insider, I’m speaking from the outside, or to it. ...
Here at Holy Apostles I’ve experienced the truth of many things I’ve studied and taught: the satisfactions of community, the power of liturgy and of collective prayer, and even of singing – of singing one’s part in harmony! (When I attended an Anglican church in Australia a few years ago, I bridled at the choir’s monopoly of harmony – even for hymns, the rest of us got only the melody line.) Yet it’s only when the congregation sings in harmony some of the time that you can fully hear the beauty of its singing in unison at others, as – especially – when we sing:
We who are many are one body, for we all share in the one bread.
Now this is a stewardship homily, and I’m supposed to remind you of all the ways you can mix your time, talent and treasure with this place. When I had only been here a few weeks – I arrived in the Fall of 2002 – Bill Greenlaw took me out to lunch. How did I want to serve? Surely I wanted to teach here, too? Absolutely not, I said, I come here to be a lay person, something I don’t fully know how to be. But of course, as my still Catholic self needed reminding, lay people can do, and do do, a lot in an Episcopal church. We reap the harvest of many people’s talents, lay and ordained, and are the richer for it – richer and, I’ve learned here, we hear more of what God has to say to us. When we preach inclusion we mean it, because our life together lets us experience its gifts all the time.)
What I’ve found myself doing here is ushering, lectoring and pledging. Each is meaningful in a different way. I won’t say much about ushering; it turns out it’s rather like being a professor of religious studies ... Let me try to say something instead about being a lector, something which – perhaps surprisingly - is entirely different from being a professor.
I had no idea how different lectoring would be until I tried it. Not to be grandiose about it, but it filled me with fear and trembling (especially when I got to read the passage in Philippians where those words appear, "fear and trembling"!). In being a lector you have a totally different relationship to the text than you do as a teacher—even if you’re a teacher who sometimes takes people through passages from the Bible, or through Biblically formed texts like, say, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. As a lector you don’t get to choose the piece of scripture you’re reading. You don’t introduce or contextualize it, you don’t paraphrase, you don’t interpret it. Sure, in reading it aloud you are interpreting it. But I found as I prepared that I was trying to do something different: to let the text speak, to let it say more things than I knew were in it. (We all know that scripture says different things to different people, and even to the same person at different times.) As a lector I try to make the text significant, relevant, available; the purpose isn’t to commend my interpretation of it. (Often—I can say this here!—I don’t know what I’m reading. The more times I read it, and read it aloud, the less I understand. And I admit I’ve had a hard time with some of the texts I’ve been given, like the insistence that not one Egyptian survived the closing of the Red Sea over Pharoah’s army, not one.) But even then, I’m trying to be there for the reading, to give it voice, make it available. It’s a humbling, but also exciting experience.
The last thing I do is pledge. Why I pledge is related to this sense of the privilege I find in lectoring, the privilege of making something available whose meanings I can’t all master, and perhaps don’t have to. Supporting this church is satisfying in a similar way. Let me try to explain by way of a digression. As some of you may know, I’ve created a class at school called “Religious Geography of New York.” In it students and I consider theories of religion and space, which generally assert that the sacred is and must be something apart, a refuge or respite – and then confront these theories with the robust and amazingly mobile religious life of godless Gotham. What was a church yesterday is a temple today, while its congregation has moved uptown, or dispersed to the suburbs, or taken over a movie theater. (Episcopalians don’t move as quickly…) But this tumble of religious communities and spaces doesn’t undermine the religious, the way theorists of religion and small-town conservatives think it must. Rather, it gives religion new form and force and suppleness. In the back of my mind as I sing the praises of urban religion is always this space: this church, this soup kitchen, this shul, this performance space … this church. Its multiple lives deepen its significance for me. I love that it can mean more to more people than I am capable of understanding. ...
Holy Apostles is a very special place, where special and important things happen. I’m not master of all of them, nor need I be. Indeed, I come here to cultivate the version of myself that lives without mastery, in searching and wonder and community and service. I’m grateful to all of you for what you give to help this place be all the things it is, and for helping it maintain the openness which assures it will be even more things in the future.
Not sure very many people got all I was trying to say (such as the implied parallel between the Episcopal Church's inclusiveness and singing in harmony), but some did. And I did - it was good to be forced to try to put these things into words.
