Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

Last weekend I attended an ordination to the diaconate for a friend in which Bishop Gene Robinson preached. Among the advice he gave to the ordinand, was this: take your office seriously, but don’t take yourself too seriously.

This is not new advice, but it is good advice. And the advice is not really about our sense of humor. It’s about our sense of perspective. It’s about understanding that while we, as a church, are doing important work, we ought to avoid developing an inflated sense of ourselves.

When the church is unable to take criticism, when it can’t take a joke or it can’t see it’s own foibles, it’s probably on its way out. Of course, the other end of the spectrum is not taking ourselves seriously enough, and undermining our ability to actually make a difference in the world.

When it’s doing its work (which it isn’t always, as we all know), the church is doing life-changing, world-changing work – it’s healing souls and working for peace and feeding people and creating community and speaking out about injustice. I take that work very seriously. Everyone should.

Jesus warns us against worrying too much about our place at the table. This is a kind of self-obsession that bores and annoys the rest of the world, like the person you might know that never talks about anything but himself and his problems and the work he is doing.

When the church is worrying too much about its place in the world – about fixing the parish hall and Sunday attendance – it can drown out the voice of Christ reminding us to love our neighbor as ourselves. Taking yourself too seriously means forgetting that salvation, in its various forms, is the end result. The church is a means, not an end.

That inflated sense of self can also lead to fear of risks. If you think you’ve got an important position, you start worrying more about maintaining it than about trying new things. If you haven’t already noticed, the church is no longer at the center of many (if not most) people’s lives. Might as well take a risk.

We all fall into this trap sometimes, worrying about our how important we are, or need to be, about our place at the table, when we should just sit down, and start passing the rolls. That’s what I think Bishop Robinson was getting at, and what I think we would all do well to remember.