A number of First Lutheran members were curious about what Wilk Miller had to say to all the esteemed Lutheran and Anglican theologians on Thursday morning when they gathered at First....Well, here it is... The Rev. Wilbert S. Miller First Lutheran Church, San Diego Satis Est: Just Bread, Wine, Water, and Words Paper Delivered at the Society of Anglican and Lutheran Theologians (SALT) Thursday, November 20, 2014 When Dr. John Hoffmeyer asked me to give a little paper today, I immediately began to tremble. I then scrutinized your names, the institutions you represent, and the titles of your presentations, and I trembled all the more. You see, I am just a parish pastor. I heard Richard John Neuhaus in the summer of 1976, before he converted to Roman Catholicism and before he became the editor of First Things. He was, at the time, the pastor of the Lutheran Church of Saint John the Evangelist (Saint John the Mundane as he liked to call it), a congregation in Brooklyn’s tough Williamsburg section. He was preaching at the installation of the new pastor at Trinity Lutheran Church on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The service was held at a neighboring church because Trinity’s church building had been recently condemned and they were now meeting in a nondescript row house. The pastor and people of Trinity seemed a desperate lot. Pastor Neuhaus said something that day I will not forget: “You may feel quite poor and bedraggled today. I want to assure you, however, that you have more than enough to carry out effective ministry. All you need for the church to be present is bread, wine, water, and the word and, the last I looked, Manhattan has these in spades.” Hence my topic: “Satis est: just bread, wine, water, and words.” More than enough! This via Article VII of the Augsburg Confession: “It is taught among us that one holy Christian church…is the assembly of all believers among whom the Gospel is preached in its purity and the holy sacraments are administered according to the Gospel.” The Gospel and sacraments are what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls the ‘gear and tackle and trim” of pastoral ministry. Gordon Lathrop writes: “Words, stories, sacraments, images, gestures: pastors have really nothing else” (Gordon Lathrop, The Pastor, pg. 1). I fear the church often does not deem such stuff as nearly enough, especially in these days when we seem obsessed with the demise of Christendom and watch once venerable and invincible churches close their doors for good. We are tempted to add fluff to ministry’s “gear and tackle and trim.” When churches and pastors and, yes, seminaries and professors too, fear for our lives, how blessed are we who discern that bread, wine, water, and the word are sufficient, satis est, for the journey God calls us on. My favorite essay on this matter is by Joseph Sittler. The title alone is worth the price of admission: “The Maceration of the Minister.” Listen to how timely his words are even fifty-five years after he delivered them at Yale’s Beecher Lectures: “The church says that it wants better preaching—and really means it. But there is in this demand some bitter irony for the preacher. To preach well requires time, reflection, solitude; and the church makes other demands of the preacher that annihilate these three requirements. Visit the former student some years later in what he or she calls inexactly the ‘study,’ and one is more than likely to find the pastor accompanied by volumes taken from the student room. Filed on top of these will be mementos of present concerns: a roll of blueprints; a file of negotiations between the parish, the bank, and the Board of Missions; samples of asphalt tile; and a plumber’s estimate” (Joseph Sittler, Grace Notes and Other Fragments, pgs. 57, 58). We parish pastors pride ourselves on such piles, positively reveling in our jam-packed desk diaries or, for the technologically sophisticated, our Iphones, that announce to any who care: “I can’t meet for six weeks; not a free day til’ then; already working 80 hours a week.” Satis est is offensive or at least embarrassing to those of us who want so much more. I should know better though…Not only did I hear Pastor Neuhaus declare that bread, wine, water, and the word are enough, I was similarly reminded three years earlier on my first day of seminary. Our future homiletics professor Bill Muehl gazed out at us from Marquand Chapel’s stately white pulpit and reflected on how thrilled we must be to be students at Yale Divinity School. He noted that our parents were thrilled, too, though not quite so happy to be paying the tuition. And our grandmas and grandpas—they watched proudly from afar as we heeded the Lord’s call as had Jeremiah and Isaiah, Elizabeth and Mary, before us. And then Mr. Muehl threw this devastating kidney punch our way: “Admit it: you are here because you couldn’t get into law school or medical school.” Lest we ever forget, he was reminding most of us that we would spend the better part of our lives being JUST parish pastors. And yet, I still catch myself flouting that pesky commandment about coveting my neighbor’s ox and ass. I long to be more than just a parish pastor. It happens most often when I visit hospitals. I carry my humble little black Almy communion kit stuffed with bits of bread, a few sips of wine, and my tiny Bible given to me by our oldest son on his first Christmas. When I gawk at the doctors with lofty titles regally stitched on their freshly starched white lab coats, stethoscopes hanging stylishly around their necks, and adoring residents genuflecting at their heels, I feel miserably mediocre. Satis est is hardly enough! And I dare say it is not just I. Others seem to want more, too. People often ask me what our church “does.” Trying to resist vainglory, I like to say, “We worship every Sunday.” This answer hardly seems adequate; it draws people up short. There is inevitably the follow-up question, “What else do you do?” There must be more than worship if our ministry is truly authentic. At First Lutheran Church, the gathering around bread, wine, water and the word instructs all else we do—as least I pray it does. Of course, we do other things—see how easily I succumb to vainglory’s enticements and entrapments! When you arrive tomorrow morning, you will see a beehive of activity: medical, dental, acupuncture, and legal clinics; social workers attending to a myriad of needs; 200 people or so gathered for the morning meal as they have done for forty years. If you come at 8:45 a.m., you are invited to participate in a first on our patio: we will have a wedding of two homeless folks, Ron and Artemis…And yet, when you ask what we do here, at my best, I say, “We worship every Sunday.” In a society mesmerized by flashier programs and chock-full calendars, it is inconceivable that God can be revealed in places like this through simple gifts of bread, wine, water, and the garbled words of preachers like me. And yet, isn’t worship where it all begins, where the vision is birthed? Dr. Ellen Beck, the director of our medical clinic, recently told me about a talk she was giving to her synagogue community. She was using the first chapter of Isaiah. I am shamed to admit I had never quite caught Isaiah’s words: “Cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; defend the fatherless; plead for the widow” (Isaiah 1: 16-17). Most of us laud the church when it seeks justice and corrects oppression. What Dr. Beck called to my attention are the words easily lost in the rush. According to Isaiah, we have to “learn to do good.” Learning such practices of the heart does not come in the air we breathe— even in lovely and temperate San Diego. We need to hear Jesus time and again: “Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me” (Matthew 25: 34-36). Who among us could imagine discovering God amidst such wretchedness unless someone taught us how? I have to pinch myself almost daily to remember Jesus’ instruction. A few weeks ago, just after noon, as our largest Al-Anon group was meeting in this room, a fellow in a wheelchair dropped his tattered trousers in the center of our patio—right out there!—and proceeded to do his business. I furiously flew out of my study and screamed, “Get out of here. You are disgusting!” His only reply, “I had to go.” He then begged of me, “Could I have a clean wash rag to clean my bottom and a fresh pair of pants?” In my rage, I had to be reminded to do good. How easily I glossed over Jesus’ words, “I was naked and you clothed me.” Just a pastor….just a pastor. Does any literary character portray the “justness” of ministry better than the whiskey priest in Graham Greene’s The Power and The Glory? He is a pathetic soul: he is constantly in search of one more gulp of brandy; he has fathered a child; he flees the Mexican authorities trying to put a kibosh on his crazed hocus pocus routine. In spite of his pitiableness, this hapless holy man carts Christ to the forlorn and broken. He is all they have. He brings baptism to little ones whose parents eagerly await his arrival in their bleak villages; he hears the confessions of those burdened by seemingly unforgivable transgressions; he anoints those hounded by death; he lugs the outlawed bread and wine from pillar to post. Just an outcast shepherd carting broken words and trifling stuff. It takes a poet’s eyes to detect holiness in such bleak circumstances. My liturgics professor, Benedictine monk Aidan Kavanagh, warned us against trying to add fluff to such bleak circumstances, especially in the liturgy. In his delightful little book, The Elements of Rite, he instructs: “The altar table is kept free of contraptions such as elaborate bookstands, pots, cruets, plastic things, electrical apparatus, aids to piety, and the efforts of floral decorators. The book of the Word and the sacrament of the Word are adornment enough.” Father Kavanagh was all too familiar with our wont to add our own ill-advised flourishes to the “gear and tackle and trim” of ministry. I recently attended a liturgy at which the presiding minister, following the fraction, added his perky invitation to Jesus’ unadorned “Take eat…Drink you all of it.” At that retreat, where we clergy were hard at work adding our own charismatic, personal touches to anything and everything in sight, he apparently could not fathom how Jesus’ ostensibly humdrum words were enough to win the day. Kavanagh urges: “Place yourself in the background…One should engage in liturgy so that attention is called to the logos rather than to one’s own virtuosity…Strive for simplicity.” Our culture is so often mesmerized by more and more. In the midst of such materialistic saturation, are we able to behold beauty in simplicity—in the arthritic yet ever faithful hand reaching for Christ’s body; in the bare and time-worn Gregorian chant; in the ancient and cobwebby church at dusk, poorly lit but richly radiant? Simplicity… simplicity… Do we still mount the pulpit and preach the simple Gospel with fear and trembling; do our hands quake as we lift the bread, elevating Christ’s body for the 3,848th time? Oh my, do I ever hope so! I always tell our members, “When I am no longer nervous on Sunday morning, that is the day I leave this place.” Willa Cather, in Death Comes for the Archbishop, spots holiness in the simplicity of the fierce New Mexican landscape. She writes: “There is always something charming in the idea of greatness returning to simplicity—the queen making hay among the country fields—but how much more endearing was the belief that [the Holy Family], after so many centuries of history and glory, should return to play their first parts in the persons of a humble Mexican family, the lowliest of the lowly, the poorest of the poor—in a wilderness at the end of the world where the angels could scarcely find them” (Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop, pg. 80). Cather invites us to search for the Holy Family in the poor and lowly who hang out at places just like this. Sonja Turner was just such a person. Her funeral was held here a few weeks ago on Reformation Day. Her ashes will be interred in our columbarium aside the remains of her other homeless brothers and sisters who found an urban oasis here at 3rd and Ash. Sonja sat at the top of our patio stairs for three years, from morning until late at night. Estranged from her family in New England and not having seen her children for years, she found solace here as volunteers and staff of our homeless hospice program, “Simon’s Walk,” accompanied her through the valley of the shadow of lung cancer; they found her places to live indoors in her final year or so and were holding her hand as she breathed her last. Somehow, these folks glimpsed Christ’s beauty in this disheveled homeless woman. Is anyone better at discovering Christ’s presence in such simple people, places, and things than Annie Dillard? Is there a lovelier description of satis est than when Annie purchases communion wine at the local village store? “How can I buy communion wine? Who am I to buy the communion wine? Someone has to buy the communion wine. Having wine instead of grape juice was my idea, and of course I offered to buy it. Shouldn’t I be wearing robes and, especially, a mask? Shouldn’t I make the communion wine? Are there holy grapes, is there holy ground, is anything here holy? There are no holy grapes, there is no holy ground, nor is there anyone but us. I have an empty knapsack over my parka’s shoulders; it is cold, and I’ll want my hands in my pockets...There must be a rule for the purchase of communion wine. ‘Will that be cash, or charge?’ All I know is that when I go to this store—to buy eggs, or sandpaper, broccoli, wood screws, milk—I like to tease a bit, if he’ll let me…And I’m out on the road again walking, my right hand forgetting my left. I’m out on the road again, walking, and toting a backload of God…Here is a bottle of wine with a label, Christ with a cork. I bear holiness splintered into a vessel, very God of very God, the sempiternal silence personal and brooding, bright on the back of my ribs. I start up the hill.” (Annie Dillard, Holy The Firm, pgs. 63, 64) Whether in universities, seminaries, or local assemblies, we are the ones called, as Walter Bruggemann urges, to bring poetry to a prose flattened world. We are the artists who somehow paint God’s presence in just bread, wine, water and words, helping people delight in toting a backload of God in the ordinary routines of life. Here’s how Garret Keizer does that as he describes the first Easter Vigil held at his little congregation in Island Pond, Vermont: “The candle sputters in the half darkness, like a voice too embarrassed or overwhelmed to proclaim the news: ‘Christ is risen.’ But it catches fire, and there we are, three people and a flickering light—in an old church on a Saturday evening in spring, with the noise of the cars and their winter-rusted mufflers outside. The moment is filled with the ambiguities of all such quiet observances among few people, in the midst of an oblivious population in a radically secular age. The act is so ambiguous because its terms are so extreme: the Lord is with us, or we are pathetic fools. I like it that way. I believe God likes it that way. My worry is always that others will be discouraged rather than exalted by the omnipresence of the two possibilities.” (Garret Keizer, A Dresser of Sycamore Trees, pg. 73) It seems to me that we are all pathetic fools, and yet, apparently, that is not such a bad thing. The Orthodox Church has an order reserved just for such fools, holy fools albeit, an order as worthy as the ones reserved for bishops, priests, and deacons. Aren’t we all fools, lay and clergy, struggling to keep our eyes locked on the simple gifts that, according to Jesus, bear life for our suffering world? Sometimes, as Father Timothy Ware points out, it is hard to tell whether these holy fools among us are on the verge of breakdown or breakthrough. Or as an Orthodox priest friend of mine is fond of saying, “These holy fools are a gift of God, but, please God, do not send quite so many our way!” And yet, Saint Paul reminds us lest we forget: “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (1 Corinthians 1: 25). What if we pray for poetic eyes capable of seeing our Sunday gathering of fools as the kingdom meal? If our Sunday mornings do not reflect how we wish our world to be, dare we scuttle Jesus’ promised presence among such simple gatherings and foolish people for some shoddy pottage of our own contriving? Shouldn’t we instead confess our sin, sin that, just like in Paul’s Corinthian days, separates the rich from the poor? As we Pass the Peace, might we have poetic eyes enough to see who is missing and at that very moment pray for grace to make our Sunday gatherings foretastes of the feast to come where all God’s children gather together for a delicious taste of grace? See, how powerful “just worshipping” can be if we courageously trust Jesus’ promise to be present with us and those we are called to love. It is not easy to discover Christ amidst such simplicity, especially when the so called brightest and best, the most entrepreneurial minds of our day, are paid filthy fortunes to lure us into believing that more is better. May we cling to Saint Paul’s words, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). You, dear theologians of our beloved church, are called to be our finest poets, pointing us to more exquisite gatherings where we behold Christ’s presence just in bread, wine, water, and words. That, of course, is more than enough.
Posted on: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 18:52:47 +0000