03 May, 2009

4th Sunday of Easter: May 2, 2009

Text: John 10:11-18

This past week, as we gathered with Lisa’s family and our friends to say goodbye to my mother-in-law, there were many opportunities to laugh and to tell stories, to listen to each other. That’s been my experience of family gatherings around funeral time. To tell stories of the deceased, certainly. But also to tell stories on each other and on ourselves. When families gather, at least the families I’m connected to genetically or by marriage, it has been so very good to remember other times we had gathered. Other experiences we’d had together. To remember the ties that bind.

And on the night before we left, as we were finishing up our dinner, we started talking about our younger days. When girlfriends became wives and we all became family. We talked about places we’d lived. About jobs we each had had. And somehow we got stuck for a little while talking about the worst jobs we had ever had. As we remembered them, I noticed there was a bit of pain in the telling. Memories of disappointments or injustices. Missed opportunities. For a couple of us, the memories were ones of thanksgiving, like thank God I got out of that one. That was certainly my experience.

I certainly have had a few bad jobs in my day, thankfully none of them as an ordained person. But if you had been on the search committee or the vestry, or talked to me about my work experience, you know I’ve done a variety of things. And there were just a few, particularly in my 20s, that might easily qualify as my worst job. Except it wasn’t a job from my 20s that I mentioned the other night. It wasn’t the 6 months I spent at the Philadelphia Int’l Airport. 6 months in the middle of winter, working from 6:30 at night until 3 in the morning. 6:30pm until 3am with Mondays and Tuesdays off. I was on a team of 6 or 7 people who cleaned the Delta jets that over-nighted in Philly. That in itself wasn’t so bad. Really it wasn’t. But once a week, my job was to drive what’s called in business – the lav truck. And the lav truck goes from airplane to airplane, removing dirty blue water from the lavs and replacing it with clean blue water. If you’re not with me on what the blue water is on airplanes, catch me in the narthex after church.

Well, I’m here to tell you, you haven’t lived until you come in for dinner break at 11 at night, go into the bathroom to wash your hands and realize you have blue icicles in your hair. That’s all you need to know about that job.

But again, that was not the worst job. Nor was the next “promotion” I got at Delta. You see, Delta at that time was committed to promoting leadership from within the company. The president of the airline, we were often reminded, had been a baggage handler when he started. And so that was my next promotion. No, not president of the airline, but baggage handler. In the summer. In Atlanta. And as the only person under 25 on a team of men bumping up against retirement, I spent the summer and fall of 1988 stacking bags in the bellies of 727s and MD88s. “Hop on up in there College boy,” they’d tell me. And hop in I would. Trust me when I tell you that an airplane cargo bin at Hartsfield Atlanta Int’l airport is a hot place to spend a summer. But I knew I was on my way to that bright future in the airline business that I had been assured was mine.

It wasn’t until I took a 5 year leave of absence from DL—from lav trucks and cargo bins and ticket counters, that I experienced my worst job ever. It was 1995 and the airline business was in one of its cyclical downturns. DL was doing something it had never done before, talking about layoffs. A leave of absence was pitched as a great opportunity to try something else, to get some different experiences. Maybe bring them back to Delta when things improved. And I bit.

Which brings me to the job I reminisced about the other night with our family. And it brings me to the point of this story. This review of the less stellar moments of my work history does have a point.

I panicked. Newly married, no real work experience outside the airline business and good old trusty English degree in my hip pocket, I needed a j-o-b. And fast. I met a woman at the airport, actually, who offered me a job as a salesman in her company. They sold marble fireplaces to homebuilders and remodelers and high-end design companies. I knew nothing about the marble business, nothing about the building industry. I knew nothing about sales. But for some reason, I was hired anyway.

It was a small, family-owned business and everyone there wore lots of different hats. IN addition to spending time on the phone and calling on builders, sometimes I’d be called back to the warehouse to load or unload a truck. I can drive a forklift because of that job. And occasionally, when a big order came in, I’d be asked to help custom-cut the pieces of marble to fit a certain job. This huge saw, with water streaming over the marble to keep it from overheating or kicking up dust. Piece after piece of Italian marble through that blade. Measuring, measuring again, cutting, stacking, measuring, cutting, stacking, measuring. One Friday afternoon in October, I was in the warehouse by myself. Measuring, cutting, stacking. And that was when I heard the voice. A voice I can only describe it as just short of audible.

“Get out of here.” That’s all I heard. I wasn’t thinking about how unhappy I was there, which I was. I wasn’t thinking about other prospects, which perhaps I should have been, or beating myself up for taking a job that in my gut I knew was wrong. I was cutting marble, and trying to keep from cutting my arm off.

Now, I’m not sure if what I heard was exactly the voice that John’s Gospel has in mind as it remembers Jesus saying, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. But I think it was close.

Listening for the voice. Listening to the voice. Listening. That’s what Jesus says his followers, his flock, will do, if they are to believe. If we are to believe. That’s how we develop and nurture our faith. By listening for and to the voice of the shepherd.

One of the ways we do that, of course, is in reading and studying scripture. Remembering, retelling and reclaiming the stories of Good News. Of the life and ministry of Jesus. And by sharing our experiences of resurrection and new life with each other. By talking and listening to God and to each other.

But it was not in the study of scripture that I heard the voice. And there was no burning bush, no parting of the clouds. No witnesses. But I have come to believe that as I was standing at that saw, completing a task that required very little thought except to keep my hands away from the blade. In the repetition and routine of the work, in the solitude of that warehouse, in the constant drone of the saw, some space was opened for me to listen. To really listen. I was in a meditative posture of sorts, with no particular thought in my head. And something shifted. My whole life shifted.

Get out of here, the voice said. And on Monday morning, after a weekend of talking and planning with Lisa, I resigned. It was still 7 or 8 years until I headed off to seminary, but the path to ordination really began there. At that saw. It began there because it was there that I began to trust my own gifts. To take seriously an interest in writing. To surround myself with people who supported this change. To trust that the work I needed to be about had to involve my god-given talents. I started pulling on threads, and following them. And then grabbing another thread. And another. Until I pulled the thread that was Emmanuel Episcopal Church.


“I am the good shepherd,” Jesus says. “I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.
A word of warning. Try not to confuse the priest with a shepherd. Sure, it’s an image we sometimes use to describe this role Beverly, Arienne and I have. And congregations can certainly be like an unruly flock of sheep sometimes. But we clergy types are in the flock as well. In fact, if you want to see an unruly flock, spend some time at a gathering of Episcopal priests. Whew.

As the called people of God, lay and ordained, we are asked to listen for the voice of the good shepherd. The true shepherd. To listen. To respond. And to discern. And then to believe. Because we can never really know if the voice we are hearing is the Good Shepherd until we try it out. Hear how others have heard and responded. That’s how are faith is discovered, nurtured and strengthened.

In the years ahead, I want us to continue to tell our stories. To let our understandings of God bump up against each other. And I want us to look for more ways to be quiet. To listen more and talk less. Something that’s so hard to do in our noisy, busy culture.

Listening. It changes lives in ways we can never imagine.