Going Out of Business

 Greater Service Springs from Lesser Certainity

Going Out of Business
a sermon by Rev. J. Christy Ramsey

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Audio from worship at 9:30 AM Worship Service November 7,2021
at Christ Presbyterian Church in Gardnerville, Nevada

I am wearing a mask so the deep breathing is not a sign of illness
but a sign of caring for others.

edited from a flawless transcription made by edigitaltranscriptions all errors are mine.

 John 18:33-37

 

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I’m wearing a thousand-dollar suit, standing on the accelerator of a quarter-million-dollar ride weighing 20 tons, trying to beat death in a race. Oh, and I can’t see a thing. The fog is so dense it’s like being in the middle of a white night. I remember this as a time I considered what business do I have being a firefighter?

Now, we may not know about kings, maybe Burger King or Carole King. But we do know about business. I think it’s helpful to look at this scripture, not about examination of how Jesus is and is not a king, but about what is Jesus’s business. We know about business. Everywhere from “That’s none of your business,” or “That’s my business,” to “The church has no business addressing anything of controversy or importance, or in contemporary thought and talk,” be it race, economics, schooling, dress codes. It’s not the church’s business. Is it?

Jesus seems to be trying to redefine what it means to be king. He both says “No, I’m not,” and “Yes, I am,” or “Not in that way.” This is a very helpful thing for us to consider in the time of pandemic. Because of all the times when we do not know where we’re going and what’s going next, in redefining what it is to be church, what it is to be Christian, now is the time. Is what is church? What is church business? We might have had a clue before the pandemic. We might have been able to say, well, the church business is to have a worship service on Sunday. The church business is to support a pastor to give comfort and challenge to the people. That’s church business.

But you all know that when the pandemic hit, you guys stopped having church services. You had to redefine what church was. You used email to connect with one another. And in a kind of a really nice spiritual technical meld, you said – Carl was saying could you all get together in your own homes and read this email, pray these prayers, sing these hymns, consider the sermon separately together in your own homes. And for a long time that was church business.

Business is difficult for us to take over as a church. If you ever heard that the church has to be run with the business, you might be thinking, well, that is just limited to generally accepted accounting principles, or that’s just limited to filling out the forms and obeying zoning laws and doing everything that a business needs to do to survive. It’s about being a good fiduciary responsibility and making sure that the money is accounted for and that the accounting is done right and that the offering is changed and that the bills are paid and the forms are filled out. Right before service I filled out another form.

So the church like a business we’d know about. But what kind of business are we in? That is a more helpful thought than what kind of king is Jesus. More and more church has been run like a business where we try to figure out exactly what our objective is, specific measurable, attainable, relevant, time-related objectives. And then we figure out the cost risk benefitting analysis. Maybe we have brainstorms. We look for expertise. We gather up data. We solve problems just like a business.

Well, that doesn’t work when everything’s changing so fast. That doesn’t work when what did happen last week, last month, last year is not guaranteed and almost certainly guaranteed not to be the same as next year. And all that process focuses on us and our expertise and our knowledge. So many churches fall into this business trap of getting the expert in. The first automatic response of any church that is looking for a minister is to say we need a pastor to bring in new people. They don’t really mean new people. They mean the same people as there are now, just 20 years younger, or 40 years younger. If you could just get us, but 40 years younger, in fact you can make us 40 years younger, that’d be okay because then nothing would have to change.

But that’s not a good way to go forward. Sure, it’s problem-solving. It’s objective. It’s brainstorming. It’s expertise-driven. It’s what everything that they teach you in business school, everything that they teach you as a way to be successful in the United States of America, salute business. But it doesn’t really serve us before or even especially during the pandemic.

Susan Beaumont wrote a really good book that is very good and somewhere here. But anyhow, ah, oh, that’s the synod executive. I brought her to help me with props. I love this. “How to Lead When You Don’t Know Where You’re Going.” How to lead when you don’t know where you’re going. You know, and I’m back in that fire truck, and my wife didn’t know about this till today, so don’t tell her, but I’m in that fire truck, I cannot see where I’m going. I literally cannot see. The fog in Ohio is so thick you can almost taste it. It is right there. And I’m in a 20-ton fire truck, standing on the accelerator, racing death to the accident scene.

Because you know you get an hour from accident to hospital. You get one hour. That’s the golden hour. If you want someone to live, you’ve got to get them to the hospital in an hour. That’s just the way it is. Well, you say one hour, okay. Where we lived, the hospital was 40 minutes away. So we had 20 minutes to get there and get them in an ambulance. Twenty minutes. Not an hour. How do you go race and beat death when you can’t see where you’re going? Go faster. You get a bigger fire truck. Get more training. None of these help if you can’t see where you’re going. You don’t know what’s coming up in the road.

I remember asking John Love, strangely enough, front seat of the fire engine, Presbyterian minister and the funeral director. We showed up on an accident scene, and people just about had a heart attack. “I’m not that bad. They’re coming for me.” No, no, we’re not here for that. What do you do when you can’t see where you’re going? Going faster doesn’t help. Having more equipment doesn’t help. Having more training doesn’t help. Susan Beaumont says that, you know, maybe we’ve got to get out of this decision-making kind of mindset, where we look to ourselves for solutions to the problems. Where we define the problems by what we are and what we see and the things we see. Where we have meetings.

Have you ever noticed we have meetings that it’s like, you ever been to California, going down here? And there’s that little building, you know, and you have to drive through, and they’re checking for produce? You’ve seen that little building. And I’m thinking what in the world? They’ve never stopped us. I don’t know, maybe because of our skin color? I don’t know what’s going on. But and you just drive on through. And I’m thinking, well, that was ridiculous. That has nothing to do with where I’m going, what I’m doing, and my purpose. And I kind of think sometimes that’s like prayers before and after meetings. You know, people, come on, we’ve got to do a prayer, and then we can get through to California and do what we’re going to do.

What if we didn’t do that? What if the doing what we’re going to do was a little tiny bit at the beginning and the end of a meeting? And maybe the meeting wasn’t a meeting to decide, but a meeting, as Susan puts out, to discern God’s will, to listen to the spirit instead of the experts. To approach our time together with openness instead of advocacy, with looking for community instead of champions of a cause. That we approached it with expectation instead of expertise. That we sought completeness, wholeness, instead of the optimal solution to a set problem. What if we counted, not clock ticks, but heartbeats? That’s for all your poetry folks here, but what about the nuts-and-bolts people here? How does this work?

It’s hard to do because we keep slipping into decision-making. And decision-making is needed and useful, but it’s not a be-all and end-all, especially if the church, especially if we don’t know what’s going on. How does this discernment work? Well, it’s taking time. It’s stillness. It’s listening. It’s deciding not to decide. It’s changing meetings into retreats. You know, what’s the purpose of the retreat? What’s the outcomes of the retreat? What’s the measurable products of a retreat? Susan says that in her things, one of the things she does, she has meetings where they covenant together that they will not make decisions during the meeting. Instead they’re there to listen to the spirit and be attentive and be prayerful. It sounds crazy just because we’re not used to it.

One of the exercises I really like, and this may be concrete enough for you to decide, think about what she’s talking about and what others are talking about, and looking toward discernment as a way to figure out what to do as a church in these uncertain times as opposed to decisions and looking to the business model. And she calls it “shedding.” And shedding is a lot of things. It’s when you put your expertise aside. And what she invites everyone to do, and maybe it’s a requirement, I don’t know how she rolls, but what she says is that whatever the issue, problem, challenge is before the group, she invites everyone to write down what they’re absolutely certain of, what they absolutely know, their core understanding of the problem, to write that down on a piece of paper, their answer.

And then she invites them to fold it and place it in the offering plate. And she puts the basket there in front of the table and says, “Here are our certainties. And we’re going to leave them there in the basket during our time together. Now, they’re still there. They’re not erased or lost or negated. But they’re just going to be set aside here. We’re going to keep them safe right here. We’re all going to watch them. And at the end of our time together, you’re welcome to pick them back up. You know, it’s nothing wrong or evil. But just for this time together we’re going to set aside our certainties that we advocate and believe and try to make happen. We’re going to set them aside and listen to what God is saying, what spirit is moving among us.” Weird. Kind of feels like Pilate must have felt talking to Jesus. What are you talking about, Jesus? Are you a king or not? Why are you being so difficult? It’s a simple question. Why can’t you decide?

You’re in a great time of change where you’ve got to decide what to do. I hope you decide not to decide. I hope you decide to discern what to do. To put aside what you think has to happen. Oh, we’ve got to have a great preacher, a great minister. Got to have Christy. Right, mm-hmm. Yeah. Put it in there. Put those aside. You know? We’ve got to have someone here to get the youth back. We’ve got to have someone back here to establish Sunday School. We’ve got to have someone, I don’t know, I’m just saying these things out. I don’t know whatever certainty you have about what you need and what needs to happen. We’ve got to get back to that garage because that overhead crane is totally underused. Got to get that gone. I read that every time I come here. So put those aside.

And then, you know, when you put your certainties aside, and your biases aside, and you expertise aside, when you put those all in, there’s room for the spirit. And that’s kind of the kingship Christ was talking about. I think. I think that was a business he was about. I can’t decide. I’m hoping more light will emerge. But it’s important to be open to that. And as long as we decide that we’re going to decide, you know, your problems and ratios and data and brainstorming and cost benefit analysis and all the great tools of business, we’re looking to ourselves and our expertise instead of to God and spirits moving.

Well, how does that work out in the world? What’s an example? I belong to a service club up the road. And as many clubs, they were disrupted by the pandemic. I mean, this is a club that was like the nightmare of germ spreading. I mean, we had – it was in the rules. You got fined. You had to shake hands with everybody in the room. You had to. We had to go around and sit together. We had to – we were singing together. We were in the same room together. We couldn’t do any of that. We had board meetings. We couldn’t have board meetings where we discussed what to do and how to do it. Couldn’t do it. We had some folks that they couldn’t come – no one could come in person. Some people couldn’t do technology, and what are we going to do?

Well, I’ll tell you what this club did. Three people, three very competent, three very successful, three very expertise business people did it all. We wound up meeting at the park. They set up the park. They bought all the food. Charged the club. It was all ready for it. The first one, me being an idiot, I brought food. And they go, oh, we don’t need that. We bought it all. Oh, okay. And so slowly over the 18 months these three people did all the work of the club. They got a debit card because it was easier to bill to the club if you had a debit card. You didn’t have to go through all the reimbursement from the treasurer. And the treasurer wasn’t coming out of her house because she was immunocompromised. And so she couldn’t even make the meetings, and she didn’t have tech to be in person. They got their names on all the accounts.

I used to do the emails. I did emails out for our big fundraiser, our big thing. I did a couple, 300 emails. And so I was asking about is it time to send another email, goes no, no, we took the list, and we had our office staff do it. It’s all done. And they did a great job, those three. It was done efficiently, purposefully, and perfectly.

And then the new president came, long-time member of the club. And at the board meeting he said, “You know, we never authorized you all to do this. We never said it was okay to have a debit card. We never said it was all right to change the names on all the accounts to you three people. We never said that you could take over this. We never said you could do that.” And he got angry. How dare they go against the perfect business plan? How dare they say there was something wrong with the perfect complete work that they did? It’s successful. They kept the club going. They made money. They kept dues. So they all quit and took half the club with them. Because they saved us.

The new president, what do you think happened? The new president resigned, groveled back, asked them to come back saying, oh, it’s a big misunderstanding, let’s have a meeting, go through all that. Well, maybe some of that happened. But what happened with me, you know, he talked to me, and he said, “You know what they didn’t get, what they didn’t understand? This is a service club. We’re not a business. We’re not here to do things efficiently and purposefully and make everything exactly the way it should. We’re not here to hire people to do service and work, but they had their office staff doing all the work. We’re here for this person to do emails, for that person to bring the food, for this person to contact the businesses, for this person to do that.

“And together we do good. And we become better people. And we make relationship with other people because all of us, no one’s doing it all. Everybody’s doing their part and doing a little part. And sure, it’s not perfect. It’s not the stellar achievement of a for-profit organization with a dedicated staff. But that’s not what we’re here for. We’re a service club so people, all the people can give service and do good for the community and for each other. That’s what they forgot. We don’t hire it done, even though it could be done even better. We do it for our souls and for our community, as well as for the people we help.”

Now, there’s a club that decided not to be excellent, that decided not to solve all their problems in the best possible way, according to the business model. There’s a club that made a conscious choice, a costly choice. If we’re going to be a service club, everyone’s going to be having opportunity to do service, a good average whatever. We’re going to do this together. We’re going to go forward together. We’re going to learn. We’re going to make mistakes. But we’re going to get better. We’re going to help each other and ourselves.

I think that’s what church should be. Not about perfection, not about what we think is tradition or what we have pride in or what we remember from the past, where we seek to have the people look to the community. But a group of people getting together, stumbling at times, but lifting one another up, saying we’re here for goodness and for God. We’re here to get better, to do good, and to be better.

And that’s what I think Pilate missed, too, about how Jesus reigned, not with ordering of things to do, but with the changing of hearts and souls and minds. And that is church business. Amen.

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Going Out of Business