Talk With the Preacher

I’m still muttering under my breath from time to time: “Why didn’t they have something like this when I was graduating from seminary??!?!?!”  What a great idea to offer young ministers a hands on experience in the parish since we all know . . . most of what a pastor experiences at work was never covered in seminary–it takes hard time on the ground to learn the real stuff.

The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s Initiative for Ministerial Excellence is offering ministry residencies lasting two years, during which time newly graduated seminary students can work on the staff of a teaching congregation and learn a whole lot of the things they never learned in seminary. 

Calvary has been selected a teaching congregation and as a result I recently got the chance to meet the other pastors who will join me in supervising residents over the next two years.  The array of settings and opportunities is breathtaking (”Why didn’t they have something like this when I was graduating from seminary??!?!?!”) and the group of supervising pastors and teaching congregations is incredible.

Next step: finding students.

This cannot be hard, I thought to myself.  In fact, if they had had something like this when I . . . well, you know. 

All of us are working now to get the word out about residency opportunities so I am shamelessly using my blog to promote them.  If you are a student who has recently graduated or will graduate in May from one of the eligible seminaries . . . or if you know someone who is . . . pass the word along, please.  Calvary already has a student for these next two years but several congregations are still looking. 

More information and the application are available here. 

I’ve been thinking about confession lately.

Lent, as you know, is almost upon us.

This year at Calvary we’re spending a few weeks learning how to confess-the value of sharing our challenges, fears, failures with others and mostly, with God . . . as a blessed way of unburdening our heavy, heavy souls.

To help us do that together in Sunday worship I’ve been on the prowl for creative ways to experience corporate confession (Do you have a suggestion?  Share! Please!), so I’ve been searching . . . for confessions.

Confessing the ways in which we fail, of course, is often intimidating if not downright depressing. The heaviness of Lent settles in and it’s heavy. Really heavy.

So all of this was on my mind the other day when I heard my littlest, Sammy, talking about his group of friends. I mentioned offhand that I thought our family decision to switch him to a special program at a new local school was a great idea.

He agreed.

And then he mentioned, offhand: “You know, as it turns out, in my class I am fairly popular.”

He said this, you should know, with a totally straight face. It seemed to be an exercise in reporting information-not even one shred of self-promotion that I could ascertain.  And watching Sammy make this declaration made me think about the way God sees you and me.

Certainly, I’d have to say, there is value in confession. I don’t know about you, but I often need to be excused from the time (after time after time) I screw up. But the problem is: when I start equating my personal value with how often I need to confess . . . well . . . well, that can get a little depressing.

I think it would do me good-and maybe you, too-to take to heart what my little innocent 9-year-old had to say: “as it turns out, I am fairly popular.”

Because . . . you know, you are. Fairly popular, that is. With the God who came to live among us to show us how we might live. Fairly popular-you and me.

Can you believe it?

This Lent, in the middle of confession, please . . . believe it.

Amen.

I have not spent too many moments of these ten ordained years living life as one colleague described, “listening to the music.”

Not the way he describes it, anyway.

When I think about it, the “music” I hear most often is a cacophony made up of staff meetings, suggestions for improving the snacks in coffee hour, hymns that no one knows after all, all of these most times underscored, frankly, by the beat of tense silence or unnamed disapproval.

But, that’s not it, my colleague said. Life has a melody, cadence and rhythm, he explained, and it isn’t made up of complaints about the sermons. It’s beautiful. And you should know, he said: if you can’t hear that music, you’re too busy.

I confess: I used to listen to pastors talk about the breathless pace they lived and the price they paid for doing their jobs and think to myself something (admittedly totally arrogant and ignorant) along the lines of: “Too bad they’ve lost their passion for ministry. That will never happen to me . . . . I’m sure if they just learned to manage their time better they would be fine. I’m sure if they loved God enough it wouldn’t be this way.” Okay, honestly, I hope I didn’t actually think (or say, God forbid!) those things, but I’ll admit the general impression was there. I knew I was different, you see, because, well, because I was a really hard worker and because I was smart and because I really wanted to serve God.

Guess what? Turns out all of them are really smart, hard workers who wanted to serve God, too. They just got so caught up in their work that they couldn’t hear the music anymore, and it just snuck right up on them before they even realized it was happening.

There are real, administrative and structural reasons for this, of course. The pastor in most churches is often expected to be all things to all people-you know, prophetic in the pulpit and hard-hitting in committee meetings and sweet to difficult church members, too. The problem that we seem to encounter after living the life of pastoral ministry for awhile is, as Eugene Peterson puts it, religiosa sollicitudo pro Deo, which sounds rather like a painful disease but actually means “a blasphemous anxiety to do God’s work for him.”

Oops! We forgot we were just assistants. We forgot the end result is not our responsibility. We forgot that we’re not God.

Here’s the cold, hard truth. When we go through life furiously trying to do God’s work for him we fail, first of all, since I personally have never even looked over the work of one week and sighed with the satisfaction that everything’s done. Worse, no matter how hard we try we just can’t seem to make everybody happy (can you imagine?)!

Secondly, when we work so hard to take care of everything for God, we wake up one day to realize that we were too busy to actually live the practice of depending on God and have become, as Eugene so painfully puts it: “parasites on the first-hand spiritual lives of others.” In other words, it’s sort of like we’ve paddled out to the middle of the lake and we’re stuck (we were so busy we forgot we should never be out there alone!). It’s awfully hard to hear the music from the middle of the lake.

Worst of all, a third reality of being too busy is that our true colors start showing, right through that heavy black robe. We wanted to be faithful, prayerful, holy. Instead, it turns out we’re unfaithful, arrogant, and selfish. We wanted to be looking out for God’s agenda but we somehow veered off course back to promoting our own-often without even realizing we’re doing it!

Waking up to see the cold hard truth makes you realize, as my colleague said, that you can’t hear the music. In fact, even when you listen really hard, you can’t even hear strains of it off in the distance. And sometimes you even start to wonder: was there ever any music playing at all . . . or was that just my imagination?

So I’ve been wondering on this start of a new year, what will it take for me to hear the music this year?

Here’s what I know and resolve.

1. I know I cannot be everything that everyone expects me to be. (Lots of hours of spiritual direction behind that one, let me tell you.) Just can’t. So, it’s my job to survey the many facets of my pastoral vocation and find the ones that bring me joy. After all, if you can’t get it all done anyway, might as well choose to do the things that feed your soul. What are those things? Here are mine: study, reading, prayer, writing, sermon-preparation, worship planning. Life is too short to live without joy. Joy, joy, joy: I will seize every possible opportunity to hear the music that sings in my soul.
2. I know my schedule is a rabid animal I cannot seem to contain, no matter how hard I try. Every time I think I have it sitting calmly, tail wagging I look away for a minute and all hell has broken loose. Everybody needs me . . . but really, could it be that I need everybody to need me? The thing is (lots of hours of spiritual direction behind this one, too): the world will not come to an end if I don’t jump at every call. The lovely thing about pastoral ministry is that a lot of the things we’re called on to do are nice things . . . but even nice things can drown out the music. I’m going to try again to build a cage around my rabid animal of a schedule so that it reflects what I say I value: God, my family, my work of prayer and study, my pastoral response to crisis. And that’s about it. Because when I start adding everything else I could be doing then I can’t even pause to try to listen to the music, even if I could hear it.
3. I know if I will be a faithful pastor to this church I need to listen intently for the music and then move to the beat of that music so God’s people at Calvary will know how to listen, too. Calvary is in such a great and hopeful place. For years this congregation has been working on changing a paradigm and living prophetically in this city. With the construction done and new members joining regularly that is coming to be. It’s not triage so much anymore. It’s time to hear the music as it swells to beautiful crescendo.

This year, I resolve: to choose work that gives my soul life and brings me joy.

This year, I resolve: to live a schedule that honors what I love most.

This year, I resolve: to put the religiosa sollicitudo pro Deo behind me so my community of faith can, too.

This year, I resolve: to listen to the music.

It’s back to school this week for an intensive week reading about and discussing the preaching of Harry Emerson Fosdick.  Although I knew of Fosdick’s lasting legacy I’d never read his sermons before now.  They are dated, of course, set in a historical context by their language and style.  But I could not believe how relevant his words still seem for us today.  I wondered: what kind of preaching lasts beyond a life, words alive and speaking still to generations following?

Some words alive from Fosdick’s 1922 sermon delivered at New York’s First Presbyterian Church: “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”:

“Has intolerance any contribution to make to this situation?  Will it persuade anybody of anything?  Is not the Christian Church large enough to hold within her hospitable fellowship people who differ on points like this and agree to differ until the fuller truth be manifested?”

“There are many opinions in the field of modern controversy concerning which I am not sure whether they are right or wrong, but there is one thing I am sure of: courtesy and kindliness and tolerance and humility and fairness are right.  Opinions may be mistaken; love never is.”

“Now the worst kind of church that can possibly be offered to the allegiance of the new generation is an intolerant church.  Ministers often bewail the fact that young people turn from religion to science for the regulative ideas of their lives.  But this is easily explicable.  Science treats a young man’s mind as though it were really important.  A scientist says to a young man, ‘Here is the universe challenging our investigation.  Here are the truths which we have seen, so far.  Come, study with us!  See what we already have seen and then look further to see more, for science is an intellectual adventure for the truth.’  Can you imagine any man who is worthwhile turning from that call to the church if the church seems to him to say, ‘Come, and we will feed you opinions from a spoon.  No thinking is allowed here except such as brings you to certain specified, predetermined conclusions.  These prescribed opinions we will give you in advance of your thinking; now think, but only so as to reach these results.’”

“The second element which is needed if we are to reach a happy solution of this problem is a clear insight into the main issues of modern Christianity and a sense of pentitent shame that the Christian Church should be quarreling over little matters when the world is dying of great needs . . . .”

I’ve been spending some time lately with the writings of Julian of Norwich.

An English woman who lived in the 1300s, Sister Julian was, admittedly, as one of my colleagues says, “a little whacked.” She is, however, also the author of my favorite regular meditation and breath prayer. (The possibilities for exploring these two facts and their relationship to each other will, I am quite sure, provide hours of entertainment for some of you who know me well.)

Julian of Norwich was what we call a mystic, which, in her case meant that she lived in a very small room all by herself, totally apart from other human beings spending all her time communing with God. And, while it is true that her hat is really weird looking and could have understandably negatively impacted her social status I’m pretty sure the whole living-in-a-cell-by-herself thing was something she chose to do on purpose.

Anyway, for whatever reason, time away from other human beings somehow helped Julian commune with God in a very deep way that produced writings now treasured as spiritual classics.

So as I’ve been reading I’ve also been thinking . . . while the solitary life seemed to help Julian live in profoundly deep relationship with God, I just can’t even imagine how the spiritual practice Julian chose might work in my reality. When I think about it, in fact, the mental image of one hand clapping keeps coming to mind, an endlessly futile attempt to create some kind of sound . . . and the echoing response of silence.

I do recognize the God Julian got to know in that cell: loving, compassionate, all-encompassing.  But I can’t help wondering if Julian ever felt like she suited up for a tennis match and ended up on the court hitting the ball over the net again and again, never quite able to discern a partner on the other side.  I certainly do not mean to imply that God is not athletic, but rather to realize: reading Dame Julian has helped me recognize that I have a hard time hearing the voice of God without conversation partners.

Personal disappointment in the hard realization that I am probably not a classic Christian mystic aside, I think I’d count myself among the group of us that needs a little feedback from fellow travelers to even recognize what might seem to the mystical among us a glaringly obvious word from God. 

It’s highly possible that this fact puts me in a special needs category when it comes to spiritual depth, reflection and process, but I have to say: if I’m going to get out there on the tennis court I most certainly will need to see a sweat-banded partner on the other side ready to try to hit back over the net whatever strange revelations about God I happen to be batting around at the moment.

In other words, when I reach my hand out in tentative, hopeful possibility that I might come to know this God who certainly though mysteriously gives my life meaning, I hope very much to feel the warmth of another hand meeting mine in what seemed before to be yawning, empty space . . . so that together our hands might make some coherent sound to describe this God we’re coming to know.

Just a little sound to break the silence . . . hand meeting hand . . . just a little whisper to help me listen harder for what I believe so deeply will someday sound like very loud applause.

Powerful thoughts from Eugene Peterson’s introduction to 1, 2 and 3rd John in his biblical paraphrase The Message:

“The two most difficult things to get straight in life are love and God. More often than not, the mess people make of their lives can be traced to failure or stupidity or meanness in one or both of these areas. The basic and biblical Christian conviction is that the two subjects are intricately related. If we want to deal with God the right way, we have to learn to love the right way. If we want to love the right way, we have to deal with God the right way. God and love can’t be separated.”