The Sermon Less Traveled
In yesterday’s Calgary Herald, Rev. Kelly Osgood is quoted as saying: “I feel for [Gretta Vosper’s] congregation. As a minister, I have a different role than those people in the pews. If I lead my people down the path of destruction, I’ll have special accountability when I meet my maker.”
Is Osgood’s claim true? Does a minister have a different role? Is the minister called by God, or by a will to power, or by a desire to serve, or by arrogance? Just what is a minister’s role? And what counts as a valid motivation for filling that role? These are all questions the United Church of Canada is currently canvassing through its Task Group on the Meaning of Ministry.
This morning Gretta Vosper leads worship, as she often does, by taking the sermon less traveled, by throwing things open for comment from the congregation. Today she invites worshippers to reflect upon and to offer experiences that have represented forks in the road. What risks have we taken to get to our present place in life? And what challenges do we commit ourselves to as we move forward from here? This is a risky approach. It’s unpredictable. There’s no chance to couch other people’s words in a gloss of correctness. And it places demands on us pew-warmers too. It makes absolutely plain what we knew all along: church belongs to us, not to the minister.
The Pursuit of Happiness
Gretta Vosper returns from a study leave which she spent at Chautauqua where she attended a series of lectures on the ethical frontiers of science. Notwithstanding the stated theme, she detected another (unstated) theme: much of our scientific research is driven by the pursuit of happiness. But research on happiness shows that as long as basic needs are met (food, shelter, freedom from fear) then our levels of happiness are relatively static. More money and more stuff doesn’t make much difference. Gretta poses – and speaks to - several important questions: 1) why do we keep behaving as if we can improve our level of happiness even though it never seems to work? 2) are there things we can do which really do improve our level of happiness? 3) what role does our community of faith have in that pursuit? 4) and (in keeping with the “ethics” part of the theme) what good does it do?/whom does it serve?