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DS Adams: We are all apple pickers

September 14, 2014 / By Christian Vischi / .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

"Friends, it’s time to go apple-picking.”

With that last line the Rev. Nancy Adams, giving the sermon during a Welcome Service in her honor as the new superintendent for the Mountain View District, received a standing ovation from the crowd of more than 100 in attendance.

Members of the Upper New York Cabinet lay hands on the Rev. Nancy Adams during her Welcome Service as the Mountain View District Superintendent at Centenary UMC in Bath. (Photos by Christian Vischi)

But she wasn’t delivering that line to get people stirred to assault the orchards around the area. She was using a story to illustrate the fact that “all Christians are called to ministry. All. Not one of us is exempt. Too often, the focus is on the pastor to do ministry,” she said.

The orchard

The story starts with an apple orchard owner and the people he needed to pick his apples. He selected his crew and they agreed to pick the apples. Although the orchard owner eventually died, the people continued to pick the apples, “year after year, generation after generation, the people lived together and picked the apples,” Rev. Adams said.

Slowly the enterprise grew and the pickers decided they needed overseers to organize the picking of the apples. So management was appointed with the grand title of “lead apple-orchard-picking people.” These head pickers chose some who were especially gifted at picking apples to lead everyone in the picking process. “You know what happened,” Rev Adams said.

The head apple pickers, by virtue of their exemplary apple picking prowess, were eventually tabbed to pick all of the apples, but even they couldn’t pick the apples fast enough to keep them from going rotten.

“(That) smell would waft into the people’s nostrils. The people would say, ‘how come those head pickers don’t pick the apples fast enough?’ Our whole orchard is rotting. It smells. There’s a great stench here. They should do something,” she said.

Even the head pickers forgot that the others were supposed to help pick the apples. When they gathered for their annual conference they would talk about that issue.

“Oh, wait. Did I say annual conference?” she said as the audience laughed. “Whenever they met together for a few days on a yearly basis, they would talk about how they couldn’t get all the apples picked. They would work within the group of head apple pickers, and they’d find the best head apple picker who would give seminars on how to pick apples to the head apple pickers.

“Every year, the head pickers would have an annual conference – I mean a special meeting – and get a really famous apple picker to come in and talk about how to pick those apples, and they would have a special choir who would sing apple-picking songs. One person would always get up and give his testimony on how he picked an apple one day. There were bookstores with books on apples and great apple-pickers of the past. ... But the stench of the apples rose up.”

A boy, who had been playing in one of the trees, noticed a hole. He reached inside, found a half-rotted book, and brought it to one of the head apple pickers. Lo and behold, it was the original instructions left by the initial orchard owner on how to pick the apples.

“They opened the book and … the instructions said that everybody is supposed to pick apples,” Rev. Adams relayed. And the people all said, “‘What a concept!’ … Now I can’t imagine anything happening like that, can you?”

The bell choir

How can The United Methodist Church protect from that happening? The first step, Rev. Adams says, is recognizing that everyone is equally responsible to The Great Commission.

One way of understanding it is through the lens of a handbell choir participant.

Years ago Rev. Adams was in a handbell choir. Her normal bells were c5 and d5 (the middlemost white key on a piano and the next one above it).

The first serving of Communion was given by Rev. Adams to her mother; Upper New York Resident Bishop Mark J. Webb (right) assisted.

“I could play my c5 and d5 all day long, but to the listener it would make no sense. Do you know any songs that have c and d as their only notes? Of course not. In a bell choirevery member is extremely important, because if just one bell is missing, the piece cannot be played correctly or completely, and it will be extremely noticeable – and not very pleasing to the ear, either,” she said. (Even the theme to the movie Jaws is more than the two notes that most people commonly sing as “Dun, dun.” Click herefor a visual example.)

During one mini-festival of bell choirs she had different bells. “But that’s no excuse,” she said. During rehearsal, one note was a half-step too high and the conductor pointed in her direction. “b6 in the back corner that should have been a b flat,” she remembers him saying. “I wanted to dive under the table. How did he know it was me?”

Just like the line from hymn #558 in The United Methodist Hymnal, the Church is a people.

“Our life together in the Church, or I should say asthe Church, is analogous to a bell choir,” Rev. Adams said. “Each of us has to do his or her part in order for us to function effectively, as we are called to do and as we have vowed to do.”

The “vowed to do part” comes from the United Methodist membership vow (page 168): renouncing the spiritual forces of wickedness, rejecting the evil powers of the world, repenting of sin; accepting the freedom and power that God gives to resist, evil, injustice and oppression; confessing Jesus Christ as savior; putting your whole trust in His grace, and promising to serve Him as your Lord; remaining faithful members of Christ’s Holy Church and serving as Christ’s representatives in the world; being loyal to Christ through The United Methodist Church and doing all in your power to strengthen its ministries; and faithfullyparticipatingin its ministries by your prayers, presence, gifts, service, and witness; and receiving and professing the Christian faith as contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.

“Fullness and beauty are lacking when a bell does not play when it is supposed to, and fullness and beauty are lacking when a person does not fulfill his or her responsibility and calling as a member of the body of Christ,” she asserted. “We are all strengthened when everyone does fulfill their responsibilities and calling and we are all weakened when we do not.”

So as she embarks on her journey as the Mountain View District Superintendent (her appointment officially commenced July 1), she said it is important to remind everyone that “God has equipped each of us with gifts to use to God’s honor and glory. May we be reminded that without our head, Jesus Christ, there can be no life as god intended. … We’re all in ministry together. Make no mistake: in the body of Christ, including on the Mountain View District, it’s always apple-picking season.”

See more photos on the Conference's Facebook page.