Rearranging Deck Chairs: 1 Peter 4:7-11
Communion Sunday, Ordinary Time
The end of all things is near; therefore be
serious and discipline yourselves for the sake of your
prayers. 8 Above all, maintain constant love
for one another, for love covers a multitude of sins. 9 Be
hospitable to one another without complaining. 10 Like
good stewards of the manifold grace of God, serve one another with whatever
gift each of you has received. 11 Whoever
speaks must do so as one speaking the very words of God; whoever serves must do
so with the strength that God supplies, so that God may be glorified in all
things through Jesus Christ. To him belong the glory and the power forever and
ever. Amen. (NRSVue)
“The
most notable fact in religion today is that ministers of all denominations are
trying, somewhat desperately but with immense energy and imagination, to find
new ways to carry God back into the everyday life of society and to make him,
in the prevailing cliche of the day, ‘relevant.’ This is not primarily a
theological movement. Still, important new trends in theology suggest that God
may best be met in the co-creation of a more humane society or, internally, in
the deepest structures of our own psyches…As so often in the history of faith,
this new effort to build a new ministry is a reaction against past failures…The
young are not as irreligious as they seem —far from it. But most fail to
recognize their religious impulse, and they satisfy it far away from the
churches.”[1]
I
get at least five emails a week from various organizations toting books,
webinars, coaching partnerships, and trainings that I as a pastor can take to encourage
stronger giving, better church attendance, higher youth engagement, pastoral
satisfaction, and quite probably how to best get out hard water stains. The quote I just read could very well be part
of any one of the scripts, articles, and opinion editorials that make up that growing
industry of telling pastors and lay leadership how we can save the Church from each
new year of numerical decline, but it’s not. That quote is from an article entitled “The
New Ministry: Bringing God Back to Life”. It was published in Time Magazine in December
of 1969.
The
article is a fascinating read all around, partly because there is still so much
of it that remains applicable in the religious landscape (not all, definitely;
there’s a lot of angst about what they’re teaching in Catholic seminaries that
is decidedly not the same conversation 55 years later). But some of the article’s staying power comes
from a different quote. “With gallows
humor, a Catholic priest dismisses reforms like lay parish councils as ‘shuffling
deck chairs on the Titanic.’”[2]
It’s the
first printed instance of the phrase, now an idiom for occupying oneself with
trivial actions while ignoring more important things. It’s something the Church hears a lot—that we
are shuffling deck chairs, focusing on banal things while our organization
sinks, while the world distrusts us more and more, while we become more and
more distanced from our own “why.” It’s
not a completely incorrect accusation, but it’s also an easy jab that doesn’t
get into why someone would want to focus on chairs in the first place. I’ve seen the James Cameron film Titanic;
I know that the scene when the ship starts sinking in earnest is one of terror,
panic, and anger. I know also that in
our 21st century world, it is an incredible temptation to make
absolutely perfect rows of chairs if it means we don’t have to face the terror,
panic, and anger that permeates our cultural narrative.
“The
end of all things is near,” begins this section of Peter’s first letter. To those of us who have gotten used to the
street preachers crying this in an effort to make passersby feel shamed, this
may not seem like the best thing to put into a letter to the faithful, but the
early Christians were excited about such a promise. Christ’s second coming, the one that would
truly free them from the casual cruelty of the Roman Empire, the one that would
restore them to glory, was going to be a relatively quick thing—maybe not next
Tuesday but surely by the end of the year.
Current
scholarship puts the writing of 1 Peter somewhere around 90—some 60 years after
Jesus’ resurrection.[3] The Second Coming hadn’t been next Tuesday, or
even the end of the year, and some of the faithful are starting to have doubts about
whether or not Christianity is worth it when people like Peter—or, more likely,
a student of Peter’s writing in his name—keep saying the end is near. The
second letter of Peter-slash-Peter’s disciple tells us that some of the
faithful are not doing well in the waiting, either abandoning the faith or becoming
bitter and cynical.[4]
We don’t
recognize that response at all, either, I’m sure.
“The end of
all things is near,” Peter reassures his audience of “exiles of the dispersion
in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia”.[5] The hope is still alive, your exile is not
permanent, God has not forgotten you—but in the waiting, the Church has to do something
constructive. Rearranging deck chairs
isn’t helping anyone, and simply saying “everything will be fine” is laughable
when everything is demonstrably not fine right now. Fear, anger, worry, and sorrow are not
inventions of the 20th and 21st centuries, so Peter says “it will be
okay” and then says “so here’s who we are in the meantime.”
“Therefore be serious and discipline
yourselves for the sake of your prayers. Above all, maintain constant love for
one another.”
Our
world is a mess. The UMC is a mess. FUMC is a mess. There isn’t a place I know of that isn’t a
mess of some format right now, including my own desk, but we and the exiles to
whom Peter writes are called not to get stuck in the mess. In this act of gathering together for worship
we remind ourselves that the mess is never stronger than the community God has
built and is building with and through and despite us. The Time article was right that we
want to be relevant, but relevance isn’t what saves us. It was right that having good programming is
swell but programming isn’t what saves us.
It was right to say that rearranging deck chairs while the ship sinks is
foolish because we are called to self-discipline, to prayer, and above all to constant
love. Our purpose as the Church in the
world is to love—to love until it hurts because it requires that we let go of
our prejudices and assumptions, to love until it heals because we refuse to let
anyone walk through the world forgotten and dismissed, to love until it covers
the multitude of sins we commit against God and each other while we, too, wait
for Jesus to make this make sense. Eugene
Boring writes that, “First Peter is thus preeminently a message of hope,
encouraging its readers to understand themselves as called to follow the example
of Christ in the context of a hostile world”.[6]
But
it is very difficult to love and I am very good at arranging chairs, so what
next? One of my college roommates
introduced me to the music of Harry Chapin, the folk rock activist who truly
hit popularity in the 1970s. One of his
songs that gets caught in my head occasionally is “Dance Band on the Titanic”
about the eight-person band who kept playing as the ship went down. While the idiom about deck chairs is a
metaphor, the dance band is true; they played to keep the other passengers calm
while they were sorting out lifeboats and all eight went down with the
ship. Only three of the bodies were ever
recovered and many survivors have lauded their heroism and what a gift it was
for them to share their music in the chaos and fear.[7] The musicians had one thing to give, and they
chose to give that when they realized that it was so incredibly needed.
“Maintain
constant love for one another,” Peter writes, and goes on to clarify how that
love looks. “Like good stewards of the
manifold grace of God, serve one another with whatever gift each of you has
received.”
Yes,
we each are called to love, but how we love changes depending on what we
have to offer. I am not good at spending
time with little children; thank you to the folks who enjoy when I have the
children’s time, but that is not my joy.
I much prefer people old enough to understand sarcasm. So I do that when it’s needed but that’s not
where I love, not fully. My friend who
introduced me to Harry Chapin is terrible at chatting with new people but marvelous
when explaining how to see Bible stories as living tableaux, so she doesn’t do
greeting and does do skits and storytimes and acting. She loves with her gifts, her signs of grace that
she stewards, cares for, gives back to the world.
Bishop
Kenneth Carter, Jr., currently serving the Western North Carolina Conference, wrote
a book in the midst of the disaffiliations in the UMC called Unrelenting
Grace: A United Methodist Way of Life.
In it, he writes, “The next generation’s church will be about justice and
mercy rooted in discipleship and spirituality as the redefined path to
sanctification. It will be grounded in
the core values of grace, connection, and holiness. This church will need leaders, teachers,
missionaries, spiritual directors, pastors, lay leaders, trainers, servants,
and builders. It will flourish as the people
who remain—who will be most of us—ask and respond to the question, ‘What gift
can I bring?’”[8]
We
who are stewards of grace have been given so much and are asked to use the
gifts that we have. So what gift do you
bring, beautiful mess? How can you let
go of your own deck chairs to love in the way that you can love, to bring grace
to a world in desperate need of it? One
possibility is our Service Sunday next week, the 14th. Instead of worship in the downtown sanctuary in
the morning, we’re going to go out and use our gifts of body and time to help
weed park gardens, sort clothing donations, clean new rooms for temporary
housing, cook breakfasts, and a myriad of other things needed by organizations
around Ann Arbor. There will be an email
out on Monday for you to sign up to be part of a two-hour block of service, of
grace, of love for this city in which we worship.
Maybe
you have other gifts you’ve been wanting to explore, serving with the strength
that God supplies. If you are great with
kids, God bless you, I don’t get that, but talk to Rachel about it; she has plenty
of ways to connect you. Music be the
food of your love? Our new choral director
Ken would be happy to meet you. If you,
unlike my friend, are super excited about being a welcoming presence, come talk
to me and I’ll help you figure out how best to use that. Want to do more community connection through
the year? Reach out to the Justice
League—or me, if you’re not sure how to do that—and ask about the ministry
partnerships we have. Your gift, your
joy is something only you can bring, so bring it wholeheartedly.
Today,
we receive the gift and grace and love of communion. Carter writes, “We don’t always love each
other well. And our communion is with a
God Whom we don’t always love completely…We receive communion with the hope
that our imperfect, even disordered loves will mature.”[9] This is how we connect to each other, to the
Church that was just beginning to realize that the end wasn’t so much near as “sometime;”
this is how we receive the reality that God is ever reaching to us with “manifold
grace,” equipping us to go into the world and love like we have it to spare;
this is how we play music rather than move deck chairs. At the table, we are reminded that we are
Christ’s Body in the world, that we are loved and able to love, and that the
fear, the anger, the sorrow do not outweigh the invitation to come, eat, and be
welcomed in by the One to Whom the glory and power belong, forever. May it be so.
Amen.
[1] “The
New Ministry: Bringing God Back to Life,” Time Magazine, December 26,
1969, THE
NEW MINISTRY: BRINGING GOD BACK TO LIFE - TIME.
[2] Ibid.
[3] M.
Eugene Boring, “1 and 2 Peter,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible One Volume
Commentary (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2010), 900.
[4] Wilke
and Wilke, Disciple: Becoming Disciples through Bible Study (Nashville:
Abingdon Press, 1993), 234.
[5] 1
Peter 1:1, NRSVue.
[6] Boring,
“1–2 Peter,” 900.
[8] Carter,
Unrelenting Grace (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2023), 58.
[9]
Carter, Unrelenting Grace, 24.
Comments
Post a Comment