The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost-The Rev. Melanie Lemburg
Sixth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 9B
July 4, 2021
Our readings for today remind me of some
advice that a more senior colleague gave to my husband many years ago. “God doesn’t call us to be effective; God
calls us to be faithful.” These words have
helped shape my understanding of ministry, of discipleship, of parenting, of
life, and I often need to return to them as a touchstone to help ground my first-born,
over-achieving soul. “God doesn’t call
us to be effective; God calls us to be faithful.”
In our first lesson, Ezekiel has just had
an up close and personal encounter with the Holy One. He is still visibly shaken from this
encounter with God, and so God picks him up and tells him that God wants Ezekiel
to go to the people of Israel, “a nation of rebels” who have rebelled against
God. They’re probably not going to
listen to you and you won’t be particularly effective, God tells Ezekiel, but I
want you to go anyway, because I want them to know that I care about them
enough to send them a prophet to warn them that they are headed for disaster.
In our gospel reading, after
encountering his own kind of ineffectiveness because of the disbelief of the people
of his hometown, Jesus sends out his disciples two by two, and he encourages
them to strive for faithfulness over effectiveness when they go out to preach
the good news saying, “Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave
the place.” Don’t try to move around
from house to house to maximize your effectiveness, he tells them, but rather
be faithful.
Years ago, I read a book titled Margin: Restoring
Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives by
Richard A Swenson who is an M.D. This
book was such balm to my soul that I used it as a young adult book study and
saw those young parents drink it down like people who were dehydrated and didn’t
even realize it. Swenson’s premise is
that many of the ills that he encounters in his medical practice can be solved
by people creating margin in their lives.
He says our lives are like pieces of paper that are full up from side to
side and top to bottom with writing. We
have filled up all the empty space of our lives so that they are no longer able
to reveal meaning. We are, as a society,
marginless. He writes, “Marginless is
being thirty minutes late to the doctor’s office because you were twenty
minutes late getting out of the bank because you were ten minutes late dropping
the kids off at school because the car ran out of gas two blocks from the gas
station—and you forgot your wallet.
Margin, on the other hand, is having breath left at the top of the
staircase, money left at the end of the month, and sanity left at the end of adolescence…
Marginless is fatigue; margin is
energy. Marginless is red ink; margin is
black ink. Marginless is hurry; margin is calm.
Marginless is anxiety; margin is security. Marginless is culture; margin
is counterculture. Marginless is the disease of the new millennium; margin is
its cure.”[i]
In order to reinstate margin in our
lives, Swenson writes that we have to understand what has led us to our current
marginless way of life, and that is progress.
He writes, “Exactly what is progress?
Simply stated, progress means proceeding to a higher stage of development. ‘The idea of progress,’ explains historian
Robert Nisbet, ‘holds that mankind has advance in the past…and is now
advancing, and will continue to advance through the foreseeable future. From at least the early nineteenth century until
a few decades ago, belief in the progress of mankind, with Western civilization
in the vanguard, was virtually a universal religion on both sides of the Atlantic.’ Progress was automatic, the inevitable
function of chronology, and the flow of progress was assumed to be inherently
positive.”[ii]
Progress in and of itself is not an
ill. Swenson as an MD writes about all
the benefits we have found as a result of progress. But Swenson’s premise in his book is that we
must regain control of progress because we have let it run rampant, dictate our
priorities, and then we must redirect it.
The first step in that is breaking our addiction to progress. The second step is to make progress
subservient to our greater goals and needs, especially relationships. The goal of margin, for Swenson, is to nurture
relationships because this is where we find meaning and purpose.
This has all been especially through
provoking for me as we have led up to this day, July 4th, when we
mark the founding of our nation. We as a
nation have accomplished so many astounding and wonderful things as a part of
this drive for progress, and we have also sacrificed relationships and people
along the way in pursuit of this goal. (This
is echoed in our thanksgiving for the nation from our Book of Common Prayer
that we are using today as our prayers of the people.)
“God doesn’t call us to be effective;
God calls us to be faithful.” Where in
your life do you need to hear these words today? What might it look like for you to set aside
your drive to be effective, so that you might live more faithfully? Where in your life might you need to examine
your addiction to progress and look to tending relationships in new and
different ways?
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