Someone from the church called me in advance to fill
me in on a few important things to know about being on the radio, and the most
important thing was silence. There is no silence allowed on the radio. I was
warned that after so many seconds of silence the broadcast will be cut off, and
the station would go to something else. It wasn’t anything personal. They
wouldn’t cut me off because they didn’t like my sermon. It’s just that there is
no silence allowed on the radio. In fact, since they had been broadcasting,
they had made certain modifications in the worship service to make sure there
would be no silence, and this essentially involved the organist playing a lot
of traveling music, as it’s called.
I did what I was supposed to do, and everything was
fine.
Then they invited me back to preach again and this
time it was a communion Sunday. A couple of things are different on a communion
Sunday. For one, there is lots of traveling music – ask our organist Susan and
she will tell you.
But the second thing that was special was that,
because I was not yet an ordained minister of word and sacrament, I could not
preside over the communion table. They knew this, but they invited me anyway.
And they resolved this problem by also asking a retired pastor to participate.
Well, everything went fine, until I made a rookie
mistake. I mean, I had never presided over the communion table before and I did
something dumb, which threw everything off and I didn’t know what to do next. I
looked over at my co-presider for help. But apparently, this guy thought his
role that day was to just stand there and look like a pastor. He wasn’t even
paying attention, so he was no help at all.
So there I was, a dumb rookie, with everyone looking
to me, as if I knew what I was doing. Which I didn’t. It felt like an eternity
as I stood up there trying to think it through. And because there is no silence
on the radio, the organist played and played and played her heart out. She had
no idea what was going on, but the whole broadcast clearly depended on her now.
During the after-worship coffee hour, I approached
her and apologized for my awkwardness and all it put her through. And she
turned to me with a wild look in her eyes that made my heart race. Through
clenched teeth she said, “Why whatever do you mean?”
She was a little frazzled. I didn’t get invited back
after that.
I had two thoughts after this experience: One was that
I had better get my act together at the communion table. And the second was
about silence. Is silence a good thing? Is silence dangerous?
The answer, I think, is yes. And yes.
Silence makes us uncomfortable. If we are with other
people and there is silence, it feels like we are wasting time, like someone
should be saying something. We may grow bored. We may even become angry.
I know that for people who live alone, silence is
sometimes sad. So we keep the TV or radio on, so it doesn’t feel so alone.
Silence in church might make you feel like you’re
not getting what you came here for. You came here to receive something edifying
– a message, beautiful music, fellowship – not silence.
Maybe we acknowledge that silence has its place, but
we like talking. As we were saying last week, humans are made for community,
and a central aspect of community is talking to one another.
I selected this passage from Corinthians for today
because in it Paul praises speech. But we find out shortly that he wrote this
with a sense of irony. In a way, he is setting the Corinthians up for a
dressing down.
Before we get into that, though, let’s take a step
back. Corinthians is one of the New Testament epistles, of which there are 21,
many of them written by Paul. Epistles are letters – letters someone wrote to
someone else, and this means that when we are reading the epistles we are
reading someone else’s mail.
He was actually speaking to someone else’s issues,
in this case it’s the church in Corinth. And the church in Corinth, it is
pretty clear from the letters, had issues.
Corinth had a long history as a prosperous trade
city. Because of where it was situated, it was the perfect route for
transporting goods between east and west. The city had a rich, diverse, and
lively cultural life. But about 200 years before Paul wrote this letter, the
city was captured by Rome and destroyed. The people of Corinth were either
killed or enslaved, the ruins of the city were abandoned.
About 100 years later, Julius Caesar rebuilt Corinth
as a Roman colony, basically, reopening Corinth for business. And it attracted
people who were looking for a new start in life. Many of these people who came
to Corinth were former slaves, hoping to make something prosperous of their new
freedom.
We hear a hint of this when Paul says, later in this
chapter, that when you were called into the church, not many of you were
powerful, not many of you were of noble birth. We might say these people were
strivers. They had ambition, but they weren’t there yet. There were some
members of the church who lived very privileged lives, but many of them were on
the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder.
From our point of view, it might be a surprise that
all these diverse people were thrown together in the church. Actually, it might
have been a surprise to them too. We can be sure that some of the problems they
were experiencing were a direct result of the diversity in the congregation.
So, in these opening sentences we heard today, Paul
is laying out some of the issues he will address, and among these issues is the
matter of speaking in the worship gathering. It doesn’t seem like they had a
problem of too much silence. On the contrary they had too much talking.
They weren’t Presbyterians. They didn’t have a
well-established order of worship as we have now. They didn’t have centuries of
tradition that informed their attitudes and behavior in worship – there is both
good and bad that we could say about that. But what this church was apparently
experiencing was competitiveness in the congregation.
They were in competition with one another about
their spiritual gifts, and this is where speaking comes in: the most dazzling
of the gifts of the Spirit is speaking in tongues. Basically, they were showing
off.
Now, I have never met a Presbyterian with the gift
of tongues, although I wouldn’t put it past the Holy Spirit to sweep in here
and set us all aflame like the apostles on the day of Pentecost. But just
because we don’t speak in tongues, it doesn’t mean this letter has nothing to
say to us. The truth is, in any congregation, there is a temptation to see
ourselves as, somehow, superior to the person who sits across from us in the
pews. Or the one who just walked through the door for the first time. And that
is a problem.
Arrogance is not a fruit of the Spirit. But
self-control is. Modesty is.
Paul writes to the Corinthians that the gifts we are
given should be used for the building up – not the tearing down – of the
community of Christ. The gifts of God are for the people of God.
Bonhoeffer has a chapter in his book, Life Together, about ministry, and he
begins it by addressing the danger of ego in the Christian community. Our egos
will put us in competition with one another, always comparing ourselves to
others. And it is to this point that Bonhoeffer lists the various kinds of ministry
that are essential in the church.
The first ministry he names is the ministry of
holding one’s tongue. The second is the ministry of meekness. And the third is
the ministry of listening. There are, of course, other necessary ministries,
but isn’t it interesting that these are the first three he puts forward?
I think it says listen: we all know what the
greatest temptations are, the greatest dangers are, and so the first thing we
need to do is check those things at the door: check our egos, check our competitiveness,
check our judginess. And only when we have done those things can we really
listen.
On the matter of listening, Bonhoeffer writes that
this is a service we owe to one another in the community. Listening to another
is a means of loving another. Everyone has the need to be heard, really heard.
So everyone of us has the obligation to hear them – no matter what they have to
say.
Because if we truly listen with the love of God in
our hearts, we will then be in a position to speak from that same heart. Only
by listening can we help in building up the community of Christ.
And so listening is an important discipline for the
church. That means silence is an important discipline for each of us
individually. And that goes back to the danger of silence.
Silence may feel dangerous to us for a number of
reasons. Maybe it makes us feel alone. Maybe it makes us feel unimportant.
But I think the real risk in silence is that we
might hear a word from God that is calling us to something new. A deeper commitment,
perhaps. An openness new people or practices. Perhaps an anointing to take on a
new role, a new ministry. In your silence you might hear it as the still small
voice of God. Or you might hear it in the words of the person sitting before
you.
Silence is good because in silence we might hear a
word from God. That is also why silence is dangerous. And it is why silence is
essential to the church.
Maybe silence is not good for radio, but it’s surely good for us.
No comments:
Post a Comment