Today Jesus urges us to be truly excellent servants (Lk 12: 35-38), servants in the Church and servants of one another. He gives the example of servants who await a master's return after a wedding, ready to greet him at any hour of the night. Jesus points out how delighted the master will be if the servants are completely ready, even at the worst possible hour-- so delighted that the master himself will wait on those servants. Since this instruction is obviously directed at us, I think we have to ask this question: why do we tolerate, even expect, mediocre work in the Church? We seem to have this idea that because work for the Church is often on a volunteer basis we don't have to perform at the level with which we'd perform in the marketplace. We don't feel we have to give it our all-- no one is paying us, after all-- so we can show up late or ill-prepared or not even show up at all. The Church should consider itself lucky to get us, we say, since we're using our free time, time we could be, say, watching football. We give ourselves a pass on being perfect and say, in effect, good enough is good enough for Church work. We even give the Church itself a pass sometimes, when it performs its administrative or ministerial tasks poorly, saying that it is the Church, after all, and mediocre is all we should expect. Since what we are doing individually and collectively is God's work, shouldn't our perspective be exactly the other way around? Shouldn't we be giving our best, and expecting from the institution the best possible work? Don't we owe it to all the members of the Body of Christ to have the Church act with all the skill, grace and competence that there is? The answer to all these questions is "yes," I think, which is what Jesus is telling us. It is in acting that way that we can be assured that the master (ie, God) will "gird himself, have us recline at table, and proceed to wait on us." The next time you hear "good enough for Church work," or something like that, or you hear people making excuses for incompetence in serving the peoeple of God, you might try-- politely, of course-- to disabuse the speaker of that notion. The people of God deserve better than that, and if we don't insist upon it, we won't get it.