Sermon for the 2nd Sunday after Trinity

Sunday 17th June 2007

Preached by Rev Paul Hewitt

There’s hardly been a month recently when I haven’t said, ‘Well, if I can just get this month over...’

How many times have you said that?

I seem to be quoting my Easter Vestry speech a lot these Sundays; I don’t really mean to, but something else popped into my mind recently that I had said then, and that is, that every clergyman needs a Peter Johnston! I’ve hardly ever mentioned this before on a Sunday morning. I know most clergy are quite disorganised, and days sometimes seem to come and go and you achieve some things, yet you miss out on others. But when Peter Johnston arrives in my study, you know things are going to get done! He has me so organised, I meet myself coming back!

Apart from all the usual things, we are also in the process of moving ‘work stuff’ from the study in the Vicarage into the office upstairs in the hall. That means clearing out filing cabinets and the kind of chaos that that ensues.

It was very clear from the outset that clergy stuff or parish stuff is in and amongst all sorts of personal stuff. For example, in the very first drawer there was ‘House stuff’ (Insurance and things) next to ‘Car stuff’ next to ‘Funeral Stuff’ next to ‘Carol Services’ next to ‘Primary School’ next to ‘Down and Dromore’ and so on.

So, the first thing that would strike you is that I didn’t have things in alphabetical order! But the main point is that my so-called ‘work’ files were next to my personal files and so on. It is indicative of the ‘job’, if I could call it that. It’s all mixed in together.

How many of you go to your work desk and have to, first of all, clear it of plates of food, sweet papers. Your pens have been moved, the papers you’ve been working on, and even prayer books and the like, could have even left the study altogether... I always say that the quickest way to find anybody in our house is for me to go into the study to start writing my sermon, and you can be sure that within seconds, there will be one member of the family in on top of you looking for something. It is a strange kind of existence. Even for people who work from home, they can at least leave their study at 5pm and lock the door. Not so in a Vicarage – we are a peculiar bunch of people.

It is happening more and more nowadays that clergy work and home life are being separated as much as possible. For example, there is hardly one parish that I know without an office and without an ‘administrator’, however small the parish may be. I think this is only a good thing from a parish point of view and from a clergy point of view.

However, there are two articles that I have in my study given to me by two different psychologists which I have kept for a long time, but I haven’t ever really got round to reading them. One of them is entitled ‘Job stress and Burnout in the Clergy’, which I can come back to later, and the other, which is somewhat related but not in a ‘clergy’ way, is entitled ‘Your Work is not Your Worth’. Isn’t that an interesting title, ‘Your Work is not Your Worth’?

It’s actually an excerpt from a book called ‘Feeling Good’ by Dr. David Burns. The first sentence of Chapter 13 goes like this:

“A third silent assumption that leads to anxiety and depression is ‘My worth as a human being is proportional to what I have achieved in my life.’ This attitude is at the core of Western culture and the Protestant work ethic. It sounds innocent enough. In fact, it is self-defeating, grossly in accurate, and malignant.”

Strong words! The chapter is 46 pages long, so perhaps I’ll get back to you someday when I’ve had time to read and inwardly digest it!

But all this raises the question of how we handle work and worth, life and family while we are constantly in a state of ‘busy-ness’. Does work equal worth, or are we misleading ourselves?

From a clergy point of view, we’re so messed up with our personal and professional roles that some of us don’t know whether we are coming or going, or whether we are up or down. A doctor who looked at a diary of a certain clergyman lying in front of him in a hospital bed once said, ‘This is the diary of a madman!’ Why, on earth do we do this to ourselves? Work does not equal worth. We have got ourselves into such a state about work, or the absence of it, that we define ourselves by what we “do” rather than by the person we “are”.

Perhaps, in some sort of clergy mixed up kind of way we shouldn’t separate what we ‘do’ as work and what we ‘are’ as people too much, because the most important thing you can bring home at the end of the week is not your pay-packet, it’s yourself!

What kind of people have we become because of our work or the lack of it? Has it really changed the way are as a person? Has it changed our self-worth? There’s no doubt that it has, but your work is not your worth!

Max Weber, the famous German sociologist, once said that “Luther and Calvin did away with the monasteries and, in turn, made the whole world into a monastery”. What he meant by that was that serving God is not something you do away from your worldly vocation, but in the midst of it; that work and ‘life’ must be kept together. The reformers made it clear that the love of God must be expressed in the daily labours that go with our vocations. The Bible tells us that whatever we do...whatever we do...in word or deed, we must do heartily as unto the Lord, and not as unto men. Only then can we be assured that we bring home not only our pay-packets, but also the kind of people that God created us to be.