Kendall's Notebook page 13
Sermon: "The Roles We Play"
By: Kendall Brown
Text: Mark 5: 21-43
June 29, 2003
On Trinity Sunday, the week before last, I ran out of time long before I ran out of ideas that I wanted to present. I was talking about the roles of the Trinity. The second part of that talk was to turn the spotlight on the human and talk about the roles we play. I will do that today.
A well-known symbol for the theatre is the mask, stemming from an ancient method of presenting the different roles of the actors by wearing different masks.
In our day-to-day lives, we too wear a number of different masks, or work out of different roles depending upon the particular relationship in which we are living at the moment.
Roles are imposed upon us from the earliest days of our lives. We are not very old before we know the difference between a good kid and a bad kid and which one we are supposed to be.
In school we quickly learn about lots of masks - lots of roles. There is the teacher’s pet and the teacher’s pest. There is the good student and there is the bad student. No one wants to be known as a wallflower, or a momma’s boy, or as a spoil sport, or a tattle-tale. At a very early age, we know how uncomfortable the imposition of a role that is not our choice can be. There might be some advantages to being the teacher’s favorite or pet, but among our peers we would rather not have our reputation defined by that one single role.
In our families, children take on different roles. Some well-known family roles are the star (the grand entrance performer for example) or the hero, the care-taker or the fix-it, the distracter, the whiner, or the hider who just disappears. Taking on these roles as children is often a survival mechanism in response to a lot of pain to be faced in an unhealthy family system. The child takes these roles into adult relationships and often discovers they no longer work, resulting in a lot of pain in relationships and disasters like: broken friendships, an inability to live with room mates, difficulty with relationships in the work place, difficulty with persons in positions of authority (teachers, judges, doctors, administrators, and even clergy) and even divorce.
Roles and role playing are in the warp and weave of our everyday lives.
I often hear the remark in conversations with parishioners and many others, “The last thing on earth that I would want to be is a minister.” More than anything else, I think that remark is a response to people’s perception that there is a ministerial role or mask that one must wear in order to be a minister. I can sympathize with people when they make that observation because there are few other jobs on earth that come equipped with as many advisors as the ministry. In thirty years of ministry for me, hardly a week has gone by when I haven’t been in at least one conversation with one person who genuinely believes that he or she knows a whole lot more about how to do my job than I do.
Many people say, “the last thing on earth I would want to do is be a minister,” out of the assumption that a part of the job is to actually meet all these different expectations coming from an infinite number of sources around you.
If someone actually thinks that what ministry is all about is living up to someone else’s expectations then they had best stay out of the pulpit. For them, the pulpit would be the first step on a journey to a mental institution!
We all have roles to play. And most of us have multiple roles to play. For the most part, roles are a good thing because we need them to define ourselves in different relationships. In my life, like many of you, I play the role of parent or father, of spouse or husband, of child –son to my parents, the roles brother and uncle and nephew. There are many roles in our families. We are not the same person to different people in our families.
In our wider lives, we play the roles of friend, neighbor, fellow parishioner, patient, client, and in our work, whatever role or roles the job requires. I might add here that in ministry there are many different roles to be played at different times and in different relationships and that is one of the fascinating and exciting aspects of the work.
There is a healthy way to handle the roles in our lives and an unhealthy way. Roles are unhealthy and harmful to us when we allow someone else’s definition of the role to lay claim on us – in other words when we try to live up to someone else’s expectations. Roles have a healthy place in our lives when we ourselves lay claim to our roles and let the definition of the role come from within us and from ourselves and not from someone or somewhere else.
In ministry, it is detrimental to the spiritual health of the minister and to the church as well, when the minister runs around like a chicken with a detached head trying to live up to everyone else’s definition of the role. The minister stays healthy and leads the church into spiritual healthiness when the minister defines his or her ministerial role from inside him or her self.
I think of the image here of Elijah ascending into heaven. As the chariot with Elijah disappeared from our presence on earth into the wholeness of God’s presence, Elijah’s robe fell off at the feet of Elisha. The robe was a symbol of the prophetic office – Elijah’s and Elisha’s primary role. The robe is like a blanket and not like a suit of armor. The robe, could fit around Elijah’s shoulders and just as well around the shoulder’s of Elisha – even if Elisha wore a very different suit size.
The prophet shapes the office, the role, not vice versa. The role, if lived in a healthy and health producing way, takes the shape of the office holder, like a robe. The shape is produced by a blend of the office holder’s personality and gifts. This is true of prophets. This is true for ministers. There is not one ministerial role for all ministers to fit into. There are as many different ministerial roles as there are ministers to shape a different one for his or her self. This is true for all roles great or small that we are in.
Some of this dynamic around roles is in play in today’s Scripture stories. We are told that Jairus came to Jesus and asked Jesus to help his little daughter. Before the conversation was over, others came from Jairus’ home to announce that the daughter was dead. They also said to Jairus, “Don’t bother the teacher any more? Your daughter is dead.” The neighbors or friends of Jairus who made that remark had a clear picture of who Jesus was in their heads. To them he was the teacher, the Rabbi, and everyone knew exactly what a Rabbi could and couldn’t do. That was the role they imposed upon Jesus. Luckily for Jairus and for us, Jesus wasted little time trying to live up to everyone else’s expectations and definitions of the role he played. He took the role of Rabbi, and with the gifts and personality inside of himself, transformed the Rabbi-role into a whole new thing, teaching a whole new rule and way of faith.
Persons who become parents are given one of the most demanding roles of all. We come into the theatre of parenting with all sorts of voices inside of our heads speaking from the memories of everyone who helped to shape us. Along with all those inner voices, there are all sorts of voices outside of us speaking through the voices of friends, acquaintances, family members, and all sorts of authorities to be found in books, on the web, and in the doctor’s office. All these voices are telling us who we should be as parents.
Being a healthy parent means being able to lay claim of the role for yourself and not letting the role as someone else defines it lay claim to you. Children need two big things from their parents. One of those things is honesty and the other is self esteem. There isn’t much honesty and there certainly isn’t much cause for self esteem in running around trying to play the role of parent to your child in accordance with the way someone else has defined that role. Even as parents, to offer the best to our children, means picking up Elijah’s cloak of parenthood, and letting our shoulders, our personalities, our gifts from god, shape the cloak of parenthood and shape how our children experience us as parents. Anything else is wearing a mask that has an element of falseness to it that most children see through at some level.
Children need us to be authentic with them. Authenticity as a person comes when the role we project is a projection of the truth inside us, not a reflection of someone else’s definition of the role.
Often for parents, the parental role feels so much like a suit of armor instead of a mantle or a robe, and is so uncomfortable in that experience, the parent decides to reject the role all together. I have heard parents express this rejection of the role the many times when I have heard the parent say, “I want my child to know me as his or her best friend.”
Being your child’s best friend in place of being your child’s parent is settling for something a whole lot less than best for both yourself and your child. Children can find best friends on the playground. At home they need that which can’t be found anywhere else. There, they need parents. They need a trusted parent to guide them when they are misguided. They need a parent to comfort them when they are hurting. They need a parent to love them when no one else does. Most importantly, they need a parent who is an adult to them in their childhoods. Switching roles and trying to be someone you aren’t supposed to be to your child is just as unhealthy as always trying to be a parent to your child according to someone else’s instructions and expectation.
The roles we have been given are gifts from God. Each role is also a place to let the love and goodness of Christ shine through us. Let us go from this place back onto the stage of life with a joy in playing the parts that God has put before us to make our own.