They Still Call Me a Volunteer

The printed sheet has been the same since 2016. Under the midweek program it says: Led by our volunteers. Marcus's name is not on it, because volunteers do not get names on sheets.

He runs it. That is not a modest way of saying he helps. He writes the curriculum, he does the safeguarding paperwork, he does the background checks on the eight actual volunteers, he buys the supplies out of his own account and gets reimbursed about two thirds of the time, he texts the parents, he drives the boy whose mother works Wednesdays, he unlocks the building at four and locks it at nine, and he has done that every Wednesday of the school year for eleven years, plus the summer thing, plus the camp.

He has a day job in facilities at the community college. The midweek program is somewhere between fifteen and twenty hours a week.

Marcus is not bitter. This is important, because a bitter man would have noticed years ago. He loves those kids. Two of them are in college now and one of them calls him on his birthday. He would tell you, honestly, that it is the best thing he does with his life, and he would mean it all the way down.

But here is the Wednesday it caught.

New pastor, six months in, doing the rounds, being helpful. He came by at seven and stood in the doorway watching thirty kids in a room that was working, and he said, warmly, "This is amazing. And it's all volunteer-run?"

And Marcus said, "Yes sir."

And the pastor said, "That's the dream, isn't it. No cost to the church at all."

He meant it as a compliment. He absolutely meant it as a compliment. He went off to do the rest of his rounds and Marcus stood there with a glue stick in his hand and heard the sentence again in his head. No cost to the church at all.

Eleven years. And there is a sentence in the world that is true, that everybody says, that is meant kindly, and that turns out to have been doing something.

You have a word like that on your situation. Volunteer. Family. Loyal. Flexible. Easygoing. A good warm word that everybody uses, that nobody would ever have to question, and that has quietly been carrying a wall.

The day the reading changed tense

Let me put down what I am not going to do, because I can feel you bracing.

I am not going to tell you what your situation is. I cannot see it. I am not going to give you a verdict on your church, your boss, your family or that pastor, who by every indication is a perfectly decent man doing his best in a job that eats people. I am not going to tell you to hand anything in and I am not going to tell you to keep going. That is not what tonight is for.

What I am going to do is take you to a synagogue in Nazareth, because of what Jesus does with a word there.

He stands up to read. They hand Him Isaiah. He finds the place, and He reads:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.Luke 4:18

Then He closes the book, hands it back, sits down, and says one sentence: This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.

Now, that passage had been read in that room every year for centuries. It was familiar. It was a lovely, comforting, safely historical passage about a rescue that happened to somebody a long time ago and would presumably happen again to somebody else at some point. Everybody in the room had a warm feeling about it and nobody in the room had ever had to do anything with it.

And He changes the tense. Not someday. Not to somebody. Today. In your ears. And the room, we are told, immediately gets very upset, which is what happens when a comfortable word suddenly acquires an address.

You are inside a passage that has just changed tense, and the God who reads liberty out loud has never read it about somebody else. Luke 4:18 is where He does it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a scroll read in Nazareth and puts an address on it in a fellowship hall in the twenty-first century.

Notice what He read out. Poor, brokenhearted, captives, blind, bruised. Every one of those words is a plain word. Not one of them is warm. Isaiah did not write the underappreciated. He wrote the plain words, and God chose the plain words, and then His Son stood up and read the plain words to a room full of people who had been managing with warmer ones.

You have permission for the plain word, and it is not ingratitude, because the plain word is the one Scripture itself uses. It is written that He preached deliverance to captives and liberty to the bruised, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an honest word safe rather than dangerous.

What a warm word does for everybody

Now I want to be careful here, because this is exactly where this kind of message goes bad.

Volunteer is not a slur. It is a beautiful thing. The whole church runs on people who show up for nothing, and if that offends anybody they have not understood what a church is. Marcus's eleven Wednesdays a year are not a scandal and they are not exploitation by definition, and I am not standing here trying to make a man angry at people who love him.

What I want you to see is what a warm word does structurally, which has nothing to do with anybody's motives. A warm word closes a question. Nobody follows up after volunteer. Nobody follows up after family, or loyal, or she's just the strong one. That is not a conspiracy, that is grammar. And a question that never gets asked cannot get answered, however many good people are standing in the room.

You are not being disloyal by letting a question be asked, and the whole of Luke 4 is a man walking into a warm room and asking one. That is the text, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates an honest question from an accusation.

And I will say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If what you are carrying has stopped being tiring and started being something heavier, or if tonight has taken you somewhere dark, do not sit alone with it in a locked church at nine at night. Tell somebody before you sleep. A friend, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is not me telling you what to do about your church. That is me refusing to leave you in that building on your own.