Praising Mediocrity

Text: 1 Corinthians 12:1-11 January 14, 2007

Let's hear it for mediocrity.

Let us celebrate just getting by. Let us commend doing less than your best. Let us extol what in the college I went to they called “gentleman's Cs.” Let us praise doing okay, satisfactory, good enough.

If this makes you squeamish, you are in the right culture and the right time. “Be all you can be” is not just an advertising slogan, it is the motto for our times. Kindly mentors tell their charges, “I don’t care how well you do, just as long as you do your best.” That is, the results don’t have to be perfect, but the effort better be.

To live in the expectation of giving 100% all the time is to live constantly on the edge of judgment. And if effort, and not result, is the criterion, then there is never a time for rest, for a little slack, for down time. And we’ll always fall short, for the job is never done, because the job is not accomplishing something but working hard. Which has no end. Live hard, play hard, is hard. Where is the Sabbath in that?

It is a kind of idolatry. Anything that commands us—orders us around—and commands our attention—that we pay attention to in a constant awareness—that thing, that force is an idol for us. Doing the best you can is a close cousin to striving for perfection. And they are both good friends of optimization: striving to make things the best possible, rather than simply satisfactory. [A friend] says I’m an optimizer when parking my car in our neighborhood. I want to be right in front of our house, so I look for the rarely-found elusive perfect spot, while passing by good spaces a half-block away that she would have taken. And perfection and optimization are both buddies with performance. Performance is doing something for the presentation of it and usually also to impress. A good performance is perfect (though no real performance ever quite is, just as no real endeavor ever quite is, either).

There are times when performance matters. When someone’s life depends on what you do, for example. But even less dramatically, in competitive situations, doing the best, optimizing, and such can make a difference. This week Steve Jobs, the head of Apple, introduced a new iPod/cell phone combo device at the MacWorld Conference in San Francisco. It was an amazing performance. The New York times said: “has there even been anybody in the history of marketing to introduce products with the sheer dazzling showmanship of the legendary Apple chief executive?” The day after the performance, Apple’s stock rose 10%.

But we, even Steve Jobs, rarely are called to situations so critical as to demand perfection and ultimate effort. That doesn’t mean that people won’t make those demands, people like bosses, families, spouses. We ourselves are sometimes the most strident demand-ers. But just because you can do something well doesn’t mean you have to. As someone said [Chesterton], if something is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. Sometimes a C- is plenty enough.

There needs to be a place in our lives where you don’t have to be all you can be. Where you can do less than best, and where perfection is neither expected nor desired. If we are lucky, home is such a place. As Robert Frost’s character says, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Regardless of your performance. Though for some, homes are not that.

But the church is. Or should be. We worship a God of grace, as Pastor Seitz reminded us last week. God loves you no matter what. We have to say this over and over because it is hard to believe. Too good to be true. Very good. You have no obligation to God to live up to your potential. If “living up to your potential” is something you have to do, then it is a “work” in the classic Lutheran meaning. That is, something you do to earn God’s forgiveness, favor, and blessing. And we are taught that there is no such requirement. In Christ’s church, it is okay regardless. You don’t have to get it right.

When Paul writes this letter we heard to the church at Corinth, he writes to a group of people who are strutting around saying what good performers they all are. They all think they are Steve Jobs. That is, they think they are great, and each one thinks that he or she is doing the most important job. Paul wants to cool this competitive and ferocious ardor a bit. So he tells them three things,

First, everything you do in the church, he tells them, is for the good of the church. The “common good,” it says in the reading. The word means “to carry with others,” to share the work like a bunch of people trying to lift a heavy box. None of you is the CEO.

Second, none of the things you do is more important than the things other people do. All are necessary, he says later on in the letter, for the functioning of the body of Christ, the church. And you are not so smart that you can say one thing is more important than another, because it is not. To make himself clear, Paul says neither (A) gifts (like prophecy or praying or evangelism), nor (B) service (like helping others and visiting them or comforting them), nor just work (like anything not covered by A and B). The Greek words, FYI, are the base of the English words charisma, deacon, and energy. They are all part of the church. Gifts, service, and work.

And third, and most important, Paul tells them that it is not they but the Spirit who is responsible for the gifts, service, and work that they bring.

Unlike a manager in a corporation, God does not try to recruit the best people available for the job. God does not ask for resumes for the folk God invites to the church. It is not because God sees all people as valuable, though that is no doubt true. But it is because that is not how it works. God does not assemble the church out of available parts. God does not put together a team.

The church is the people who gather there. The Spirit takes those people and allots the gifts, services, and work according to the way the Spirit chooses. It is not so much that there are a diversity of skills brought to the church to be assigned. But that there are a diversity of gifts, service, and work that the Spirit dispenses among the people who have actually gathered. When people come to church they are transformed by the Spirit (“activated,” it says in our reading; but “energized” would be better). So it is sufficient; the church lacks nothing.

That is why no one in Corinth can be too proud, because it is the Spirit’s allotment that they have. And it also why being the best you can be is totally foreign to this passage, because you may not have been chosen for what you do best, but for something, maybe, that you don’t even do very well. But that you have been energized to do nonetheless. Nothing that happens here depends on your being skillful, even though everything that happens here is a result of your skills.

There is something wonderful and rich about this. Long ago, when I was first starting to come back to worshiping in a church after a twenty-year break, I went to a minister friend to ask what I could do to serve, to help other people besides myself and family. She quoted me a passage a little further on in Corinthians, saying to me “people have lots of gifts. Perhaps you are serving by doing what you are doing best already.” It was not what I wanted to hear. I wanted to do something that someone needed. I did not want to be valued for what I already could do. I wanted to be seized by God and led to a place that needed someone, anyone, even me. And so at my friend’s suggestion I started volunteering in a prison, where I was energized by the Spirit, though I would not have put it that way then, and transformed to do my barely satisfactory work there. Which was good enough. And for me, freeing and revealing and life-changing.

The pews of the church are made for those who choose to sit in them. The church provides a sanctuary—a safe place, a holy place, meaning a place set apart. The are enough forces in the world, in our lives, that drive us to perfect, optimum, arduous, performance and 100% effort. But the church, a sanctuary set apart, need not be one of them. It is a place to put all that aside for a bit. It is okay. This is your home. A place to bask in the grace-filled approval of God, and to be energized by the Spirit.