This week's been a blur

And that's likely to continue as the month wears on. This Thursday I had been looking forward to meeting with the subcommittee on examinations of the Committee on Ministry; I was in the process of preparing a sermon on Amos 8 (the lectionary text for that Sunday): I was thinking to myself, "getting this out of the way, right before vacation, traveling to Durham, and leaving Jami up there, as I get on a plane to come back to Atlanta and begin this CPE residency - that will be good." Now though, because the committee doesn't have a quorum (suddenly a week before it meets there's no quorum), I'll have to wait for a exam on the 16th of August - provided that that date the committee has a quorum. Will there be a quorum? What's to stop them from doing the same thing all over again? What's to stop one after another of them from saying, "I'll do something else. There's plenty of other people to be on this committee. They don't need me." When you're notified a week in advance, you know that the lack of a quorum was not caused by an accident, a funeral, or a hospitalization. A week in advance, you know that they could have come, but that it wasn't important enough for them. I'm sure that each absence is an absence of missionary zeal: each absence is not a preference to hit the beach, but a desire to tramp into the rain forest of Guatemala bringing medical supplies and rebuilding the shack with the corrugated roof that was the only hospital/school house/shopping mall/church for 100 square miles. I'm sure that the people whose absence caused this lack of a quorum will attend the August 16th meeting, even though they suffer now from malaria, dengue fever, gangrene, the spontaneous sloughing off of limbs, and the flesh eating virus - all acquired just this week in service to the gospel. They will be there, because after hectoring me to cross every tee and dot every aye and lecturing me on what it is to be a chaplain, they will be there because they treasure the vow they took to be a friend to their colleagues in ministry so seriously. And it's that one word "friend" that convicts them to the core of their hearts. For they understand friend and being a friend, not in the context of a back slapping bon homme, that subsists on the surface of relationships, but that they understand friendship in Aristotelean terms: that friendship is a matrix of accountability, wherein we construct narratives of living out the gospel, wherein we learn the virtues, and wherein we model for each other what it is to carry the image of Christ - as Paul said, "till Christ be formed in us," implying that the Christian life is a life of relationship to and with each other and with God. And that to simply let a meeting not meet because of a failure of quorum, because they took a vacation, would be a dissing of the relationship of ministerial friendship at the very moment that relationship would be forming. They wouldn't do that. I know that I wouldn't do that to them - especially seeing how's I'd taken a vow.