It's not about me.

“It’s not about you,” said my wise friend. She is sister/mother/confidant/confessor/mentor… her words were neither condescending nor timid. These were the words of truth, given as a gift. These are the words that echo in my mind when the way becomes wearisome, and I wonder what I am doing attempting to live fully and faithfully into two professional vocations (to say nothing of the others) simultaneously.

I have heard many pastors talk about how busy their holy weeks are. It is, to be sure, a busy week. It holds more church services than any other week in our liturgical year. The services are full of meaning that cannot be digested all at once, so we faithfully try to distill and define them for the people who may or may not understand what this Jesus stuff is all about. Jesus is about a lot more than what we can convey, but not for our lack of trying.

This year, I am being forced into trusting that the Spirit will move through the words. As I switch off between writing final papers and writing sermons, between research and drafting bulletins, I am thankful. I am thankful for the prayers on my lips (mostly that I survive) that remind me that I cannot make my words mean enough or be enough – in either my papers or my sermons – to convey the depth of work or depth of faith (sometimes both) that lies just beneath the surface. I am forced to trust that the Spirit will move through my words and that Christ will be found in a sermon I need to release before I have properly edited it, before I have crafted every word despite my love of fluidity and form. I am forced out of worrying about whether the music will come off smoothly, out of worrying about the people who only come on Easter but not on Good Friday, and forced to allow God to pry them out of my clenched fists as God says to me, “These are mine.”

This isn’t about me. To be sure, worship this week takes a lot of work and a lot of planning and there is a lot of meaning packed into it. As things go wrong during worship services (and they do, and they will), I realize that it is never the things that come off smoothly during holy week that remind me the Spirit is present. It is the irruptions of laughter, the organist that plays B-flat for an entire hymn in D major, the kid who screams at an inopportune time during the sermon, it is the cacophony of sinner-saints that don’t quite know how to do church because they haven’t shown up since Christmas, it is the mother who sits in the front row, straining to hear, though having a squiggly toddler who refuses to be quieted by cheerios… it is all these things and more that remind me that this isn’t about me.

It doesn’t really matter – not really – if worship services come off as planned. It isn’t our responsibility to pack all of Holy Week into Palm Sunday or any of the other services during this week so that people understand the full meaning of it all. Because they can’t. Because we can’t. I am increasingly convinced we aren’t supposed to, the layers of liturgical significance can never simultaneously be filled. We are forced to focus, to breathe, to trust.

It’s not about us. It’s about Jesus, being for us. For all the centuries the Spirit has moved through these words, proclaiming the gospel through imperfect preachers and imperfect worship services, it is easy to forget: she moves even still, calling, gathering and enlivening the church. We are merely stewards of the mystery, called with Mary Magdalene to share it with others: Go and tell, you sinner-saints: go preach the gospel. Anything other than this, finally, is adiaphora.