Preached by the Rev. David Henson
Sept. 7, 2025 at St. James Hendersonville
By now, most of you have probably seen the announcement that our interim associate Kellie has accepted a call to be the rector of a church in Texas, and that we’ve already conducted a successful search for a permanent associate.
We’ll share more information about all that in due time, but for now, what I will say is that hiring a priest in our world isn’t easy. So I feel extraordinarily blessed to have so serendipitously welcomed Kellie these last 9 months and to be welcoming our next associate priest before the end of the year.
But I gotta say, there are some really interesting resumés out there from folks looking to do ministry.
One, though, really stood out.
By a country mile.
And for all the wrong reasons.
Lots of red flags.
First off, no degree from an accredited seminary and no formal religious training. In fact, they don’t have a background in ministry at all. Instead, they worked in construction for a while, but there were lots of unexplained gaps in their employment to the point that I questioned whether they’d been able to hold down a steady job for much of their adult life.
A standard, subsequent background check turned up an arrest record and a reputation for disruptive behavior in places of worship that undermined clergy leadership. Their sermons range from confusingly vague to distressingly pointed. They aren’t concerned with family values and advocate, in more than one instance, people leaving their families entirely. And, I don’t know what their political beliefs are, but they don’t think anyone in church should own anything on their own.
And that was when I realized we probably wouldn’t be hiring our Lord and Savior to serve as our next associate rector.
Let’s be honest. On paper, at least, no church in their right mind would actually hire Jesus. He’s probably not even going to make it to the interview round. It’s clear he hasn’t taken a single class in congregational development, church growth, or strategic planning. Half the time, his words seem intended to actively discourage people from following him!
If you want to grow in measurable, tangible ways, if we want St. James to be successful, conventional wisdom says hiring someone like Jesus is a terrible place to start.
I mean, could you imagine if we used Jesus’ words in the gospel today as our stewardship theme?
We might be able to get away with “Count the Cost” but, can you imagine being inspired by a theme like: “Hate Your Family” or “Carry the Instrument of Your Death and Torture” or “Give Up All Your Possessions”?
I’m exaggerating, of course, but as I reflected on Jesus’ words this week, I started thinking about ambition and vision and how we measure success and achievement, both in the church and in our own lives.
Do we measure our success in the size of our salary, the number of our clients, or the impressiveness of our homes; or our church’s success in the number of pledges, the beauty of our buildings, or how many people attend worship each week?
All these things are important ways to measure the health and vitality of a parish or a personal business.
But what if the point isn’t success, but faithfulness instead?
In Luke’s gospel, Jesus consistently turns upside-down and inside out these common benchmarks for success and signs of God’s favor, particularly for those living in the first century.
Poverty, rather than possessions.
Faithfulness to God, rather than your family.
Willingness to die rather than surviving at all costs.
Those things are hard to hear, much less to live.
We want to live until we’re ancient. We want our families to stay together. We like the security and comfort of our stuff.
Those aren’t bad in and of themselves, but if they become our deepest convictions, our reason for being, or our measure of a successful life, then we might find ourselves tempted by the good in us to do what’s bad for others.
If family togetherness is my deepest desire, then I can justify a lot of things in pursuit of that end, including denying family members their own identity or independence. I can even watch another family suffer or be torn apart in hopes of protecting my own.
If wealth and comfort is my deepest desire, I can justify almost anything, even exploiting the poor or using others to increase my bank account or sense of financial security.
If life itself is my deepest desire, then I can justify almost anything in its pursuit, even killing others, even killing an entire group of people who I view as an existential threat to my existence.
In the name of family, security, wealth, and life, we can talk ourselves into almost anything and feel righteous the whole time.
I can even talk myself out of hiring Jesus at St. James!
I think that’s the most sinister thing about the nature of evil. It takes our natural desires, even our best desires, and exploits them for harm, all while convincing us we are actually doing good!
It’s why I think Jesus consistently targets these core values of family, wealth and security, and life itself as barriers to discipleship.
Not because those things are necessarily bad, but as followers of Christ, we can never let those things become our ultimate purpose or even understand them as truly belonging to us. Instead, God wants us to understand these things as gifts—whether our children, our wealth, or our very lives—that we are to steward in the name of God and for the purposes of God.
It’s how we keep those good things from being corrupted into our idols.
So, the cost of being a disciple of Jesus is, in part, to let go of our grip on them and allow our meaning, worth, and identity to be shaped solely around the life and teachings of Jesus.
For Jesus to become the absolute center and measure of our lives; our desire above all others.
It’s not to say that we automatically give up safety, comfort, and family to follow Jesus, but that those things never become excuses for us to do evil and harm in the name of good.
Ultimately, I suppose, if anything is to be the measure of success in a church, it’s whether we’re becoming, both individually and as a community, more and more conformed to the mind of God, to the life and teachings of Jesus.
So maybe the question isn’t, “Are we good Christians?” or “Are we good Episcopalians?”
But, “Are we faithful disciples?”
Do we love, even the unlovable?
Do we welcome without reservation or distinction?
Do we seek to serve Christ in all persons?
Do we forgive 70 times 7?
Do we love mercy?
It’s difficult to quantify and measure these sorts of things, I think in part, because they tap into something infinite, the very nature of God. .
And something infinite cannot be commodified, reduced to a bullet point on a resumé.
There is no place on a resumé for the casserole you brought to a sick neighbor, or the kindness you extended to an overwhelmed cashier, or the way you cared about the poor, the stranger, the vulnerable in our society..
There’s no place on a resume for being a good person, a good friend, a good neighbor.
There’s no way to market putting others before yourself with the humility of a servant’s heart.
There’s no way to measure the impact of these things …
Unless you talk to the people they touched.
Imagine if, instead of looking at Jesus’ resumé, we simply checked his references.
Because if you did, I imagine a different picture would emerge than the one on paper.
“He made me whole again, maybe for the first time in my life.”
“He just knew me and loved me anyway.”
“He made you believe crazy things. Like a new world was possible even when everything around you told you the world was falling apart into chaos.”
“It was like he wasn’t breathing oxygen like the rest of us, but like he was breathing the very presence of God; compassion, love, forgiveness came off of him in waves.”
“He was strange, but not in a bad way. He was different. He had this fundamental goodness about him. But he wasn’t good in the sense that he followed all the rules, but good in the sense that when you were around him, you felt like you’d gone back to the Garden of Eden.
“He made you believe that love really could change the world.”
To be honest, I still don’t know if I could actually hire a person like that, but I’ll tell you one thing for certain, I’d love to work for him.