“Sacred Recycling”

A Sermon for The First Parish Church in Weston, October 9, 2011

delivered by Celie Katovitch

“Whoever tries to keep her life will lose it, and whoever loses her life will save it.”

            You can find quite a gallery of paintings of Jesus-- images of Christ as a white man, a black man, a brown man, and as a woman; Christ with a dove and Christ with a sword; Christ as emperor and Christ as liberator of the oppressed. The one that comes to mind from my childhood, though, is a pretty traditional rendering; perhaps it will sound familiar to some of you. In the picture I call to mind, Jesus’ face is bathed in a radiant glow; he is robed in angelic white, looking serenely down at me out of peaceful eyes. It’s a picture of Jesus as someone calm and nurturing, someone who would sing a child a lullaby.

            It’s a little hard for me to match that Jesus with the words in Luke’s gospel. “Whoever tries to save their life will lose it”-- a statement distinctly unsuited for a lullaby, if you ask me. I can think of few things less calming, in fact. Life may be like a box of chocolates, a hard row to hoe, and any number of other melancholy metaphors-- but I confess, I would like to keep mine a little longer. This, to me, seems like a statement sprung from that mysterious core of Jesus’ personhood-- that mystery that is what all the many renderings of his image, with their vastly different Christologies, have in common (for that matter, maybe it’s what explains their vast differences). It points to the Jesus who speaks in paradox, at once mystifying and hitting that part of us that resonates when we hear something we know to be deeply true. In one breath we say, “How is that possible?” And in the next we ask, “Ah yes. It is true. I don’t understand how--but I know it’s true.”

            Thank God for those moments. Thank God for such paradoxes, and their power to startle us. If we are lucky, they may startle us out of an old way of thinking.

            One thing that I had been thinking a lot these past few weeks was about what it means to be your “ministerial intern.” The question has traveled around and around in my thoughts, like a song lyric stuck in my head. What’s the precise relationship between those two words? What’s the “minister” and what’s the “intern”? Maybe you all, having welcomed a long line of ministerial interns, find the answer more obvious than I do. I suspect that I will arrive at it only through talking with and walking with and serving together with you.

            Nonetheless, I was mulling this question last Wednesday as I was walking through the halls of Harvard Divinity School, where I am in seminary. I am sure, actually, that I was thinking of that and also a whole lot of less important questions: what I was going to cook for dinner when I got home? When would I find the time to write this or that paper? Would the new Lady Gaga postage stamp outsell the new Justin Bieber postage stamp?

I must have heard some sort of commotion outside, because I paused to peer out of one of the mullioned windows at the courtyard. Looking thoughtfully out of the one next to me was a member of the school’s facilities staff. Ron was a fairly short man, in his late sixties I would guess, whose brown face well creased with age and frequent smiling. I often saw him around campus, watering the grass or sweeping the steps or rotating the trash and recycle bins, though we had before now never exchanged more than hellos. As we were both paused at the window, however, Ron--maybe noticing my preoccupied expression--offered some words of kindness words wished me luck in my studies. “I always try to encourage people,” he said. “That’s a big part of why I’m here-- to encourage the students and make sure you all are getting through okay.” I asked if the job was treating him all right. He shrugged noncommittally. “I like it well enough.” Then his voice lifted with commitment again: “But I really enjoy the people, I enjoy the students. I’m here to be supportive of you all and give encouragement.”

            I asked who encouraged him.

            Without a word, he pointed upward. The well-worn smile was out again.

            “God encourages me so I can encourage the people here,” he said. Then his face became a little bit serious again. “God’s encouragement isn’t something you can hold on to,” Ron said. “You want to give it away. You give it to somebody else, for them to have and then to make something new of and then pass on.”

            I knew that we were standing on the edge of a holy moment. “Yes,” I said, “I know that feeling. It’s like...” I searched for the right image.

            “It’s like recycling,” said Ron.

            How hard it is to describe the beauty of that moment. It really was almost like something out of a parable. God’s encouragement is like recycling: so strange, so true. And it had that mystifying, soul-piercing kind of truth to it because it was an image that had grown from Ron’s own day-to-day work, and so was exactly right. Ron said this, and it startled me out of all of my distractions. I felt the dawning of a sudden clarity. I looked at Ron’s face--which, by the way, bore absolutely no resemblance to my picture of the lullaby-singing Jesus-- and saw the face of Christ.

            Ron’s job was to take care of the school grounds. Ron’s vocation--what I would call his ministry--was to support the people who attended the school, as he heard God calling him to do. I do not know how Ron felt about his “job”. It could be that it brought him joy and abundance; it could be it brought him very little joy and very little pay. But whichever of these was the case; it was a job that Ron had made the vehicle for his ministry. His job was the setting he had chosen to bring that ministry to life.

            There is the job: intern. There is the nature of the vocation: ministerial. If we are lucky, the two can interweave. Ron was a ministerial groundskeeper. In and through his grounds keeping there was a ministry: a holy work of service to others, encouraged by God. An increasing reality for many among us is that jobs are lost, and new ones are hard to find. But one cannot lose a vocation. Our tradition has long taught that everyone has a ministry. And this is what a vocation is: it is a lived response to the kingdom of God that is within you. It’s the bringing of that kingdom--that core of yourself through which the spirit speaks and God’s encouragement resounds--out into the world, to offer to others. What is your ministry? Perhaps you are a ministerial teacher, a ministerial lawyer, a ministerial manager; or perhaps your ministry comes through knitting, through visiting your neighbors when they are sick, or through singing in a choir.

            Ultimately, a ministry is a giving from your deepest self, in order to help others nurture that part of themselves. In other words, it’s a kind of stewardship. When Jesus said that to save one’s life is to lose it, he was not just thinking of the opposite of life being literal death. I think he meant that to horde one’s life to oneself--to live without ultimate concern for others, without being a steward, without “recycling” care so that it remains part of the world and sustains our companions--is to lead something other than a full human life. We will each walk through our shadowed valleys; some of us are walking there now. But I pray we may know that in the life of one who has heard God’s encouragement and passed it on to others, goodness and mercy are sown that outlast even death. “Through the death of others we have been born,” writes Ernesto Cardenal. “Death is sacred recycling: another phase of life. There is something that doesn’t die in us: a DNA of risen bodies… All those we call dead are alive, because the past exists like the present, although unseen.” Life, and even death, in their most mysterious and essential dimension, is an act of stewardship. In our lives and in our dying we have it in us to tend the souls of others, out of God’s tending to ours…. And I believe it is in that tending that we find the eternal.

            For Ron, literal steward of the seminary grounds, God’s encouragement was like recycling. For each of us, there is a different thing, sprung from the everydayness of our own lives, which speaks to the heart of our ministry. What is God’s encouragement like for you? To what and to whom are you a steward, nurturing and passing on that encouragement?

            In the journey of answering those questions, may you find blessings in the paradoxes. May you meet companions and strangers whose faces show you the face of God. And may goodness and mercy follow you all the days of your life. Amen.