This past weekend, Tom Ehrich, a church wellness consultant and Director of Church Growth and Development at St. Bartholomew’s in New York, visited Holy Comforter for a series of meetings on the topic of “best practices” in congregational development.
Tom was our preacher on Sunday, and his sermon moved me and many others deeply. Speaking on the Gospel text from Mark 1:40-45, where a leper is cleansed and made whole by the gentle and willing touch of Jesus, Tom related a story about attending a recent concert by the famed violinist Joshua Bell at Avery Fisher Hall in New York.
After an ovation from the packed house at the end of the program, Bell offered his rendition of Massenet’s “Meditation” from “Thaïs” as an encore. You could just hear the intake of breath, not only because people recognized it, but because it was so extraordinarily gracious, beautiful and soft. People were sitting forward in their chairs, there was a hush in the hall. Everybody stopped coughing if you could imagine that. Bell gets to the very end and plays a final series of ascending notes which ends with a suspended harmonic, the finger just barely touching the string. The harmonic was ethereal, as if you had climbed the stairway to the angels. It was stunning. I was in tears. And I turned to my wife and said, “How can a human being do such a thing?”
Before Jesus became the centerpiece of an institution, the alleged source of doctrine, rules, boundaries and walls, he came into a world of desperation, a world of oppression, a world of brokenness, a world in need of healing. He came to all people—the sick, the sorrowful, the excluded, and he also came to the proper, the establishment, and the winners. He came to all of them and rested his finger lightly over their lives—not the heavy hand of Caesar, not the heavy hand of the religious establishment, not the heavy hand of right opinion and doctrine, but the light, almost not-quite-there touch of grace. He put his fingers on their lives, and he played a harmonic, he played a note in their lives that no one had every played before. He took the common stuff of their instruments, which in the eyes of the world was nothing, and he touched them so gracefully that they produced a sound, a love, a community, a life, that was like a new harmonic and they became a thing of beauty.
How can we as the body of Christ, the People of God, be present in times like these? How do we turn around a long 45 year decline in membership attendance [in the Episcopal Church and other mainline denominations], and how can we turn around the moral drift of these historic times and the bitterness that is so prevalent in our land right now? How do we take all that we’ve been given, which is good, and how do we make it beautiful? How do we make it sing?
I believe that we can do it. God want’s us to do it. And the world desperately needs us to do it. And we will do it not with the heavy hand of a prideful institution. We will not do it with the pride of Caesar or the wealth of Caesar. We will not do it with wonderfully organized hierarchies of power. We will not do it with careful allocation of privileges. We will not do it with right opinion or impenetrable doctrine. We will do it by placing our fingers on people’s lives and just barely touching them, playing a note that is not a note that anyone has heard in those lives before. God working through us can give us the capacity to touch and to make music, to take our common stuff and play it higher and more beautifully than its ever been played and make of us a song.
And if we can get out of our own way and let go of all the things that stand between us, people will turn to each other as I turned to my wife, and they will say, “How can this be? How can people do this?” And the answer will be, “It’s by the grace and mercy and love, and power, of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”
Tom rightly reminded our congregation that “church wellness” is not a state that a congregation reaches and then maintains. It is a dynamic of receiving and giving, of opening our hearts in compassion, of one beggar leading another to find bread, of letting the song of our lives be played in generous and trusting ways by the Master Musician who has raised us to newness of life.
Visit Tom’s excellent web portal here: Morning Walk Media
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I absolutely LOVE Tom Ehrich’s image of Christ’s touch on our lives being like that of an harmonic tone on a violin. When I was a kid, I was overjoyed to learn how to play harmonics on my violin. It was PRECISELY because that light touch produced such an ethereal sound that I loved to find that tone. The touch was a catalyst, and I could never understand how it was that an ordinary student with no great talent could make that sound come out of a very ordinary instrument. It seemed almost magical.
It only happens with the lightest touch at exactly the right position. Even though the rest of my violin playing was mediocre, that high harmonic on the E-string was always beautiful. It immediately immediately transported me beyond myself and my very limited ability. Each time I found the right spot and touch that could produce the harmonic, I was amazed anew. It was as if it could ONLY be beautiful. If it was not beautiful, then it wasn’t really the harmonic. It was all or nothing.
I’ve never heard it voiced before that it was like the touch and grace of God, but I recognize immediately that such is, indeed, the apt description of the experience. Tom’s words hit the mark as distinctly as one’s finger must touch the string to open that particular portal to the experience of God. When we go to the exact spot at which we vibrate in sync with God’s Will, it is not us, but God that comes through, and what might be mediocre outside that place, suddenly is beautiful.