Sermon by Kate Rae Davis, MDiv, graduate of the College for Congregational Development and and winner of the Bishop’s Preaching Award 2017 at Cathedral Day, April 28, 2018, St. Mark’s Cathedral, Seattle, Washington.
Jesus commands us to “strive for the Kingdom.”
In my work at The Seattle School, I’m designing a program to address burnout in helping professions, especially pastors, and if I were to summarize the root of burnout, “strive for the Kingdom” might be a good one.
I know one pastor suffering a burnout experience who is just starting pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago. This is all she can discern to do — to walk her way back to some semblance of hope via a trail in northern Spain.
On pilgrimage, everything you need for weeks is carried. She wears one of three sets of clothes she brought with her — she “does not worry about what she wears” in a very literal sense; her options are limited. And she doesn’t worry about what she wears in a figurative sense: she is not worried about how she appears to others, not anxious about proving herself to anyone.
Worrying about “what you wear,” in the ancient world, was about worrying about how others perceived you. Your clothing would convey clear messages about your profession, your wealth, your place in society. Today, our signs are different — the type of watch, the brand of shoes, the designer of a handbag — but what’s conveyed is the same: social status. So when Jesus says “do not worry about what you wear,” he’s saying to not worry about how you’re perceived. Am I good enough? Smart enough? Holy enough? Competent, helpful, insightful enough?
Am I too much? Too outspoken, too heady, too emotional?
In her burnout, this pastor had to give up her professional identities. In order for her to start recovering, in order for new life to be an option, she had to go further than burnt out; she had to enter death: die to the false self that wanted her to appear competent and capable, die to any notion that it’s on her to bring about the Kingdom.
Trying to appear and act as though she was competent enough, professional enough, sacrificial enough had only led her into burnout.
Meanwhile, I’m here trying to convince you fine people that I’m holy enough or smart enough to have some insight into what Jesus means in “Do not worry about your life.”
The bind I’m in is that I’m enacting my anxieties even as I’m preaching on a text that tells me not to be anxious. This sermon has been a great temptation to show you all how smart and articulate and creative and scripturally literate I am. To show you all that I’m worthy of your time. To show Bishop Rickel that I’m worthy of his preaching award. Perhaps, to show God that I’m worthy of a pulpit.
The truth is, I don’t know that I am. I am anxious about “what I wear,” despite the alb; anxious about how I appear to you.
It feels as though the whole world is geared towards the development of that false self, geared towards being more — smarter, richer, busier, nicer, more powerful, more respected.
Jesus invites us to the let that false self die, invites us to let anxiety die. In other words: Jesus invites us to faith. I can be anxious about what I wear, or have faith that I am acceptable. I can be anxious about the fruits of my labors, anxious about each word, sentence, and idea, or have faith that what I brought to the work is enough. I can be anxious that the meditations of my heart and the words of my mouth are pleasing to God, or have faith that God loves me no matter how this sermon goes.
[inhale.]
On Palm Sunday, the youth of St Luke’s, Ballard, led our congregation in the Stations of the Cross. As we walked the neighborhood, they connected the Stations to the daily lives of our unhoused neighbors. We stopped in the church’s garden, at the urban rest stop, and at the library — all spaces that our unhoused neighbors spend time. We stopped at the alley where a man recently died of exposure and pneumonia and Britt, our vicar, gave the last rites. Our final stop was in the Ballard Park — at the bronze leaves in the sidewalk there. Those leaves are in sidewalks all over the city, bearing the names of men and women who have died on the streets.
We were walking to this memorial, and a woman approached us. She was in layers of dirty and mismatched clothing; her hair had that frizzy fried look that it gets when it’s not cleaned regularly. She hugged Britt and asked what we all were up to. Britt said, “We’re going to remember the people who have died.”
And the woman replied, “Oh, I remember them all.”
She said it with such depth. Like, in that moment, she was holding all the names and faces and stories and personalities, and their impact on her — and I thought, This woman bears the divine.
John implores us to confess, so here is my sin: With few exceptions, I know most of our unhoused neighbors by what they consume in our ministry that serves breakfast every weekday. I know how many hundred meals we served last week, how many pounds of coffee we went through, how many volunteers it took to prepare and serve that food. And I know our guests, to a lesser extent, by what they produce — trash and needles, mostly.
But this woman. She knew them as people; saw them as more than their social standing or their refusal to be good producers or consumers, their refusal to strive to be better capitalists. She knew them as fellow journeyers on the road, knew them as the beloved of God.
God doesn’t see us for what we “wear”– doesn’t see the dirty, mismatched clothing, doesn’t see anyone as the addict, doesn’t define people by what they don’t have — namely, housing. God loves them as this woman does; for the people they are.
It seems, perhaps, like bad news for those of us who are competent, who are capable producers, whose addictions are socially acceptable — the addictions to helping, to achieving, to busyness, and to praise. But the same is true: God doesn’t value any of us for the role we play; doesn’t see us as the executive, the professional, the priest.
Consider the birds of the air, Jesus invites us. There’s a bird that lives near my house who has this little two-note song he repeats [doo-doo]. This morning he started at about 5:30. This bird does nothing for me, produces nothing of value, and yet I know it particularly, and if it were to go away, I would notice.
One of the few things birds can be said to produce is songs. They do not pursue ornamentation to convey status — nor do they cover up the beauty of their plumage. And God loves them, as they are, for exactly how they are. Loves them in the particularity of their song and their plumabe, recognizes the particular importance that each one holds — even the bird who only sings a two-note song.
If God values us for something other than how well we perform, something other than how good, productive, helpful, or holy we appear, then striving for the Kingdom is not the same as striving for God’s approval.
If God loves us fully and already, perhaps all that is left is for us to respond in joy. To do the work God has given us to do with gladness and singleness of heart — exactly because it brings us gladness in our hearts.
It feels to me that the only appropriate response to God’s love is to do what I love; to live in to the authenticity that God instilled within me. As Ignatius prayed it: All that I am and all that I have you have given to me, and I give it all back to you to be disposed of according to your good pleasure. Or as Marilynne Robinson put it: There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, all of them good.
God delights in our authentic identity, as individuals and as parishes.
Each parish represented here is a different limb on the Episcopal branch of the Jesus movement. In appreciating and delighting in our differences, we call one another to the fullness of our particular identities.
At St Luke’s, we feed people because it brings us joy. Recently, our volunteer coordinator granted one of the women our Volunteer Recognition Award, and as we thanked her the early mornings and hours of service, she said, “Thank you for giving an old widow something to care about.”
Our joy may not be your joy. Your parish might find joy in gifting the world with beauty and art, another in bringing together people of multiple cultures, another in assisting in refugee resettlement — The joy of being bound to one another is that no one parish has to do everything in striving for the kingdom; we are partners in the work, freed to respond to God’s love with joyful acts, freed to live into our particularity, because that is where God most delights in us.
You are already loved, exactly as you are. You are already loved. You are already loved.
May you respond to that love with joy.