The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost-Rev Melanie Lemburg
The Very Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg
11th
Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 13B
August 4, 2024
I’ve just started reading a book on
organizational development titled Stretch:
Unlock the Power of Less-and Achieve More Than You Ever Imagined. In the introduction, the author, Scott
Sonenshein, poses three questions: “Why
do some people and organizations succeed with so little, while others fail with
so much? Why do we get caught up chasing
what we don’t have? How is it possible
to achieve more prosperous organizations, rewarding careers, and fulfilling
lives with what’s already at hand?” He
begins to answer these questions by identifying two different ways of being in
the world or dealing with resources:
stretching versus chasing. He
writes, “Stretching is a learned set of attitudes and skills that comes from a
simple but powerful shift from wanting more resources to embracing and acting
on the possibilities of our resources already in hand.” He continues, “Chasing, and those who
frequently rely on it, chasers, orient themselves around acquiring resources,
overlooking how to expand what’s already in hand. Their decisions and actions might appear very
reasonable on the surface, but I will expose the harmful consequences that lurk
deeper and ultimately upend success and make people miserable.”[i]
Here’s an example that Sonenshein gives. Let’s say you need to put a nail into a
wall. Chasers will spend time looking
for a hammer, and if they can’t find one, then they’ll go buy one to get the
job done. If they can’t acquire a
hammer, then the job starts to break down and they can’t complete the task. So to anticipate future challenges, the
chasers will try to acquire as many tools in their tool box as possible, even
when those tools don’t meet an individual need.
Over time, the toolbox gets larger and larger, making it difficult to
remember what’s inside. But Sonenshein
writes that Stretchers “make good use of the tools around, experimenting and
testing the conventional limits of what’s a hand. If a rock is the only think
around, a stretcher can pick it up to bang a nail into the wall-or an available
brick, can of beans, high heel, or heavy flashlight.” Both are ways that can competently get a nail
into the wall but with very different consequences. [While using a hammer may appear to be a more
elegant solution to hammering a nail, much time and effort may be wasted on looking
for the right tool and not putting nails into the walls. And, when we see that others have better
tools, we not only feel bad but also think we can’t get things done with an
inferior tool box.][ii]
So, what does all that have to do with
church or faith or the gospel? This is
our fourth week out of seven as we make our way reading through the book of Ephesians
as our epistle reading. Scholars believe
that Ephesians probably wasn’t written to the specific community in Ephesus,
but rather that it is what is known as a “circular letter” which means it was written
to be circulated to a number of different early Christian communities or
churches. (It has been attributed to
Paul, but scholars now think that Paul probably didn’t write it because there
are many inconsistencies in the style and language used from the letters we
know were written by Paul, but it was most likely written by someone working with
Paul.) And one of the beautiful things
about Ephesians is that it is a hymn or a love song to the Church or to
Christian community.
Our
reading for today reminds us of the importance of unity among people in Christian
community, that it is unity that is modeled for us in and through God. If this
passage makes you think of baptism, then you get a gold star because it makes
up the opening acclamation of our baptismal liturgy. Our portion for today also talks about how
within a Christian community, each person is given gifts that come from Jesus,
and these gifts are spread out among a community, so that not everyone has the
same gifts. And the gifts that Ephesians
enumerates here are to different roles or callings withing and beyond the
community—all for the sake of building up the body of Christ and bringing
people into unity in the faith.
Our gospel reading today gives us a
reminder of how we don’t always receive the gifts that are right in front of
us. The people questioning Jesus have
just received the gift of food (and the miracle or sign that provided it) in
the feeding of the 5,000, and they have chased Jesus down and are asking for
more miracles so that they might believe.
They even reference the gift of manna, which is the bread that God
provides for the Children of Israel when they are wandering in the wilderness
so they wouldn’t starve, and at first they are grateful, but shortly after,
when manna is the only thing they had to eat, they quickly pivot from gratitude
to complaining.
And we get this, don’t we? There’s an old saying that “familiarity
breeds contempt.” We don’t always
recognize gifts, even when they are right in front of our faces. It often takes some stretching to see gifts
in a different light. This is true for both individuals and for organizations,
even and especially the church.
Can you think of a time when something
that you took for granted was revealed as a gift, or when you stretched a bit
to accept a new gift or a new way of being in the world? Was there someone who helped you see that
gift or helped you grow into it? So many
times, it takes another person recognizing a gift in us, holding up a mirror
for us, in order for us to recognize it in ourselves. What are the gifts that you have right now
that you might have overlooked or which new circumstances might be calling you
to stretch into?
Ephesians reminds us that this nurturing
of and recognition of gifts is a part of the gift given to us by the Holy
Spirit at our baptism, and it is the work of the church to seek out the
giftedness in each other because when a variety of gifts is offered to the
community, the community thrives. I
can’t help but wonder what are the gifts that we as a faith community have that
we might have overlooked or what new gifts are we being called to stretch
into?
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