Too small a thing

The following is the valediction address given by Dr. Garwood P. Anderson, Dean of Nashotah House (retired) and Professor of New Testament, on May 23, 2024.

Commencement Valediction 2024

If the Old Testament lesson sounded familiar to you this evening, you can give yourself credit for your attentive participation in the Commencement Mass. Although it was not originally scheduled for this Evensong, it was no accident that it was read.

As it turns out, we are reading through Proverbs in our daily office lectionary, and the appointed reading is from chapter 7. As much as I believe in lectio continuo and lectionary discipline, that reading from Proverbs is an extended warning against loose women and adultery. 

“Happy commencement to you. Here’s a final word from the retiring dean!”

So while I like a preaching challenge as much as the next guy, it seemed like a pretty heavy lift to turn that admonition into a valediction. And there are a few wadded up drafts in an office waste basket to prove it.

Instead I hoped it would be fitting to hear again from Isaiah 49, which is among those passages that we have come to know as Servant Songs. There is a reason that this passage especially is associated with the church and her mission. Remnant Israel, God’s Servant, has a mission here described; it is a mission taken up by God’s Son; which, in turn, is a mission entrusted to God’s People. 

The Servant is raised up to regather the lost sheep of Israel, to restore the wayward remnant of Jacob. This is the good news Israel in exile would hope to hear – the best news – that, through his appointed Servant, God is restoring the fortunes of Zion.

But there is a twist. 

The Servant, having acknowledged that God formed him from the womb to bring Jacob back to him; the Lord interjects a surprise: Yes, yes. All of that. But he goes on: “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the preserved of Israel; I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (Isa 49:6, RSV). 

The point is clear enough: our wildest dreams are not wild enough. The proper longing the Servant might have for Israel’s restoration on this side of the exile – good though it is – is still less than God has in mind.

“I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” 

In times of trouble and decline, in a season when we may think of ourselves in exile, the first, and too often the final, impulse is to look inwardly or even to focus on institutional survival: How do we get this church back on track? How do we get people to return to our services after COVID? What does the seminary need to do to improve its recruitment? How can the church become relevant again on the other side of this season cultural indifference or even hostility?

There is nothing wrong with these questions. In fact, there would be something wrong with not asking them.

The impulse for the good old days or for the restoration or perpetuation of an institution are not bad impulses and fully understandable. 

But this right impulse is the wrong impulse when it becomes the only impulse.

This is because the well-being of churches and the stability of institutions has never been more than a penultimate good in the economy of God. Even the full restoration of Israel from her exile is not the end in itself.  

In the words of Isaiah, “it is too small a thing”(RSV) to long for parochial success if success is only defined parochially. A growing church attendance or a sound budget or even a growing seminary are “too small a thing.” 

The message of God through the Servant is that our wildest dreams for our ministry are usually not wild enough. While we rightly pray, work, and hope for fuller pews, sounder budgets, for a respectable music program, or to take up again our once esteemed place in the community, these are not the ultimate goods for a church called God’s Servant, named for the Servant of God, Jesus Christ.

These good things are not good enough. And when made ultimate they will prove unworthy of our sacrifices and at their best will only offer us self-satisfaction, or quite probably deny us of the same. 

One of the greatest contributors to ministry burnout is that we have given ourselves to “too small a thing.” A sustainable and orderly parish is a wonderful thing, but when a sustainable and orderly parish becomes an end itself, it is “too small a thing” – “too light a thing.” Not, mind you, too easy, but too insignificant.

The point here is not that we are called to plant megachurches with megabudgets. No. The point is that God’s mission, if it is God’s mission, does not terminate in the church as it is, until the church, God’s Servant, fills the earth with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea. (Hab 2:14 RSV adapted). 

When God has made us to be a light to the nations, how can we simply settle for keeping the lights on? 

When it becomes the church’s clear and unmistakable purpose to be a light to the nations, when the glory of God expressed in the redeeming sacrifice of Christ embracing a harassed and helpless world – when this becomes a singular passion, keeping the lights on will matter, but it will become “too small a thing” and it will take care of itself.

If it seems like I am now talking like an evangelical . . . well, you had to find out sometime. (And I don’t think this has been a very well kept secret, in any case.)

I am sometimes called an “evangelical,” to which I can only say, “Would to God that it were so!” – that the evangel of God might become our one, consuming passion to the ends of the earth until the end of the age.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.