WLSU: Waiting (Tables) for the Lord

And on the shifts when things were going well, I felt like the job was almost magical. The kitchen staff would plate these gorgeous, delicious dishes, and I would get to present them to tables of hungry, happy people. Waiters aren’t strictly necessary, you know. Someone could just cook you a meal, and you could walk up and pick it up and go sit down and eat it.

But on those magical evenings, we act as facilitators of everyone’s joy. Chefs and cooks want to please diners, but very rarely do they actually want to interact with them. They are artisans and craftspeople plying their trade. They want the dish to be prepared correctly and beautifully and then they want to move onto the next dish. And diners want to enjoy the chef’s handiwork but would also just like to be taken care of, to be treated as special to enjoy each other and have an experience.

And on the good days, waiters help make that magic for both the front of the house and the back of the house – for the diners and the cooks. We are the go-betweens. We serve the table on behalf of the kitchen, and work with the kitchen on behalf of the table.

Of course, we are still the go-betweens when things go sideways, when things are out of whack. When the wrong dish is brought out, or something is overcooked, or if a diner is unpleasable or unpleasant – we bear the brunt of that. Especially when it’s tip time.

We also screw up a lot. I was particularly terrible with those little cocktail trays. One time I was serving drinks and spilled a whole bottle of beer down the back of a diner. Another time I was pouring a $100 bottle of wine and gave the first three people way too much and had no wine to give to the fourth person. Rookie move. I was new. And I awkwardly looked at the people and said, “um, shall I open another bottle?” No. No was the answer.

Anyway, I think that being a priest is a lot like being a waiter.

On a biblical level, there’s a lot of precedent here. The priestly role in our scriptures is a go-between role. In the religious rituals of God’s people, the priest was appointed as the holy middleman – representing God’s work to the people and representing the people’s work to God.

And on a practical level, in modern times, the parish priest fulfills a similar role. To be clear, I am not the chef. And I’m not the manager or the owner. I am a facilitator of relationships. I seek to help God feed you, and I seek to help you receive and understand the love and mercy God is cooking up.

Like waiters at a restaurant, priests are not actually necessary. God can communicate to people any way God wants, and people can talk to God any time they want. But as with fine dining – it seems both people and God have found some comfort in having a mediator, one who can facilitate that relationship on a formal level. And when it’s good it’s great. Magical. The giving and receiving of grace, the facilitation of blessing.

If we’re being honest, sometimes God resembles a brilliant, temperamental chef. And with the same measure of honesty, sometimes people can be unpleasable and unpleasant diners who hate to leave a tip.

And like waiters, we priests screw up. A lot.

During my recent sabbatical I had some time, space, and distance from my beloved church community and was able to reflect on my holy middleman status. One of the things I was able to think about is how I screw up.

I am not beating myself up or shaming myself when I say this. I love my job and am not terrible at it. I was not sitting at home sullenly stewing in my mistakes. Rather, I was meditating on my part in what has been working well and what hasn’t.

Aside from spilling beer down someone’s back or getting an order wrong, when waiters screw up is when we forget our role: We can think it’s our job to please everyone. We can think we are supposed to be the diner’s best friend, or that people came to the restaurant to see us. Contrarily, we can treat the whole thing as transactional. We can get snippy and short with the kitchen. I would take myself too seriously and get self-righteous. One time the manager pulled me aside and sat me down because I yelled at him and the line cooks, “Well SOMEONE oughta care about the tables, and apparently it won’t be any of YOU.” That’s right: I got put into time out for being too self-righteous.

Waiting tables for the Lord – has similar pitfalls. What I noticed when I went on sabbatical was just how much I was carrying. And some of that is just part of the job – there’s a lot of emotional labor in the facilitating of relationships. But some of what I was carrying was because I was forgetting my role. Thinking I was supposed to please everyone, or that I was supposed to be everyone’s best friend, or that I was the star of the show. I can treat my role as transactional too – not in the sense of trying to get you to tip me – but in the sense that I can think that I have to earn your approval by doing enough things just right. And in both the restaurant and the church I can get too serious and self-righteous.

The wonderful thing about sabbatical was not that I magically got to fix all these things. It’s that I got to step back and remember that God is in charge, and that I don’t have to over-function for the people I serve to be in relationship with God. In fact, what happened at Church of the Redeemer is that people stepped up – and not just the other clergy, though they did indeed step up beautifully. Ministry leaders stepped up and created programming for this coming Fall and organized amazing gatherings like our inter-faith dinner. They recruited more people for ministry and welcomed new people into the life of the church, making sure everyone was seen and heard and valued.

And then I remembered: The people of my church, they’re not the diners at the restaurant. They’re my colleagues, my partners, my fellow waiters. They’re not here to be served. They’re here to serve.

Sometimes you can forget your role too. But I see so many of you remembering. We’re in this together. Learning how to rely on each other, sharing in the work of feeding our neighborhood, our community, our world with the love and mercy of the one who prepared the table in the first place.