Who, me?

And I am discovering it again in this week as I am walking into a new responsibility in the Society of the Holy Trinity as a Dean of its largest chapter, with pastoral responsibility for 34 pastors and programmatic responsibility for retreats, and a major responsibility to serve as the chaplain to the national assembly of the Society this coming September.

Even as I have been called to these tasks, the Lord is opening the doors to equip me to carry them out, sometimes in ways that I cannot foresee.

And thus it will be for each of us when we give up on the list of excuses.

Oh, we think that they are reasons, but most of the time they are rather lame as reasons, they are the things that we allow to be in the way of what the Lord God is asking.

I think every person who has served as a Stephen Minister at St. Mark's has gone through the phase of the “Who, me?” protests.

But in each case, they discovered how they could be equipped for this special service in the name of Jesus.

And thus in the same way we could name our places in each of the ministries and activities of the parish, as well as the ways in which we live out our faith in daily life away from the gathered congregation.

As we get moving, the Spirit will show us how to be equipped for service.

It is not optional.

We will get the smear tactics from the world around us saying something like “Stop proselytizing and imposing your religious opinions on others.”

We have a commission: “Go,... make disciples....”

And it further specifies the prime ways in which that happens: baptizing and teaching... and other passages talk also about modeling holy living.

We're not backing down from those things.

We're not coercing people or imposing something on them, but we are under orders to make Jesus' promise available to everyone who will listen.

We don't have a choice in the matter.

It's a directive, for each of us.

None of us can slide it off to someone else by using any of the excuses from that list with which I began few minutes ago, no matter how attractive.

What friend, neighbor, co-worker do you have who might become a candidate in The Way next fall?

It is time now to be discerning who those persons might be.

But we're not ever alone in this or other tasks.

Lo, I am with you, to the close of the age, Jesus says.

In our lesson today Jeremiah was wondering about even getting started.

For others, the problem may be related but a bit different: “Look, I've been at this a long time; how can I keep on going as the years go by and the situations change?

We may be just plain weary; we may feel we don't have energy to re-tool for the changed situation, we maybe heading toward despair.

An incident from the life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn may be helpful for us to hear:

When he was a prisoner in the Soviet labor camp, he worked in the fields, his days a pattern of back-breaking labor and slow starvation.

One day his hopelessness became too much to bear.

He felt no purpose in fighting on; his life would make no ultimate difference.

Laying his shovel down, he walked over to a crude work-site bench.

He knew that any moment a guard would order him up, and when he failed to stand up, would beat him to death with his own shovel.

He had seen it happen many times.

As he sat waiting, head down, he felt a presence.

Slowly, he lifted his eyes.

Next to him sat an old man with a wrinkled expressionless face.

Hunched over, the man drew a stick through the sand at Solzhenitsyn's feet, deliberately marking the sign of the cross.

As Solzhenitsyn stared at that rough figure, his perspective changed.

He knew that he was only one man against the Soviet empire.

Yet at that moment, he also knew that the hope of all mankind was represented by that simple cross – and that through its power, anything was possible.

And so he slowly got up, picked up his shovel, and went back to his awful work.

He could not have known at that point that the things that he would come to write in the coming years would be read and appreciated across the world.

There is the power of the Spirit to equip us for life even in the most difficult circumstances.

Such is the power of one person when he or she realizes that his or her life really does matter.

Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you..., says the Lord.

One writer has commented: “There is no greater blasphemy than for you or me to say that we are nobody.”

[And to take it one step more, we should note that the nation has just marked the 40^th anniversary of the declaration that millions of infants never existed, that they were nobodies.]

We are somebodies, not because of things that we have done or not done,

but because before we could do anything at all, God created us in his image,

because Jesus loves us so much that he comes among us in the flesh,

because he dies on our behalf to show us the path to new life,

because he invites us to walk his way.

This week I heard from a pastor recently returned from Ethiopia what that can mean in that troubled land.

The Muslims came to a village and took the local evangelist and cut him into pieces and sent the pieces to all the surrounding villages with the message that this is what will happen to the rest of you.

What did the Christians do?

They gathered all the pieces of their evangelist and buried him, and they immediately commissioned and sent another evangelist back to the village in his place.

The Makaene Jesus Church of Ethiopia will not be intimidated or stopped by so small a thing as the fear of death.

And how does that true story sound against the limping list of things that we usually say?

Yes, we should be embarrassed.

But that isn't the end of it.

Jesus says That was then; this is another day, another opportunity for us.

What are you and I going to do with the gift of today, because I want you to:

Go..speak..pluck up..pull down.. destroy..overthrow..build..plant. Amen.

Please note: The preceding sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him.