This being Confirmation season—the last class is Wednesday and the Confirmation service will be this Sunday, Pentecost—I have been wondering if any of the Confirmands may be called to the Ministry of Word and Sacrament. This, after all, is the time in their lives when they may begin to feel that nudge of God’s Spirit, probably not knowing what it is at the time.
I admit to being pulled in two directions on this. On the one hand, I get excited by the possibility that one of “my” kids will join me in this exciting, discouraging, exhilarating, frustrating, rewarding calling. On the other hand, I believe that there are many callings, and that the call to be a MWS is no higher than any other call. As the Apostle Paul says, “if all were preachers, who would fix the plumbing?”--or something like that. After all, when my care needs work, I don’t call a fellow pastor, I call a mechanic. I believe that he or she may be called to be a mechanic just as much as I am called to preach and administer the Sacraments. One of the bones I have to pick with Rick Warren is that he says in The Purpose-Drive Life that it doesn’t matter what you do for a living as long as it gives you the opportunity to witness to your faith. That, it seems to me, is not a Reformed understanding of vocation.
Having said that, I still get excited by the prospect of someone whose faith I have had a hand in nurturing decides to pursue a call as Minister of Word and Sacrament. Part of the reason may be that it recalls my own call and my own vocation, and in that I suspect that I am like a teacher whose student decides to go for an education degree. But there may be another reason. Knowing that young people still feel called to serve this amalgamation we call the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) may be a sign that God has a future for us, whatever that future may be, and that gives me hope.
Yes, I do think I see a future minister in my current Confirmation Class, but I’m not saying who just yet. I just hope, when they do decide, I’m still around to say, “I knew it all along.”
Monday, May 17, 2010
Friday, May 14, 2010
The Story of Your Life
The World is Full of Stories
A Baccalaureate Sermon for the Ar-We-Va High School Class of 2010
Genesis 1:1-2:2
Revelation 5:1-14
John 3:1-17
The world is full of stories.
There are jokes, novels, fairy tales, epic poems, parables, histories, biographies and a dozen other kinds of story I can’t think of right now.
There's your story.
And there's my story.
Donald Miller says that the most important thing we can do with your life is to make a good story out of it. But most of us don’t pay any attention to the story our lives are telling. Donald Miller says that he began to think about his life as story when he was contacted by a producer who wanted to make his book, Blue Like Jazz, into a movie. Since the book was based on his own life, he had some pretty strong ideas about how it should go. But the producer and the screenwriter convinced him that if they just filmed his life the way it happened, it would be—well, dull. Steve, the producer, put it to him this way:
“While you’ve written a good book, thoughts don’t translate onto the screen very well. The audience can’t get inside your head like they can in a book. They will be restless. They won’t engage. Trying to be true to the book is like asking people to read your mind. A story has to move in real life and real time. It’s all about action.”
“You think they might be bored if we just show my life the way it is,” I clarified. I guess I was asking for reassurance that my life was okay.
“I think they’d stab each other in the necks with drinking straws,” Steve said. “Nothing against your book. It’s a fine book,” he added after I’d sat silent for a moment.
I imagined people stabbing each other with straws.
“You in?” Steve asked.
“With their drinking straws?” I asked.
“Crazy, right? We can’t let that happen...”
I thought about it for a moment. I thought about artistic integrity. I was going to tell him I needed a couple weeks to consider the idea, but then he said how much he’d pay me, so I told him I’d do it. (Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, p.20)
In the process of writing the screenplay, Miller realized two things. One, that his life was boring, and two, that he had the chance to edit his life. In movies, editing involves taking the thousands of feet of film and cutting it and fitting it together so the story flows, makes sense, moves along, and doesn’t inspire people to stab each other in the neck with their drinking straws.
Of course our stories as we live them out are a lot messier than any movie. Things happen to us that we don’t choose and can’t foresee. We are given and denied opportunities; we make some good and bad choices that have consequences that we have to live with; we have a set of gifts and limitations that we can’t do much about. But that doesn’t mean we are stuck with what we’ve got.
The world is full of stories; there’s your story, and there’s my story, and over all our stories there is God’s story, which is a lot more exciting than the most exciting human story.
God’s story begins before the beginning, but our story begins in the beginning, as we heard from our first Scripture reading. It begins with God creating the heavens and the earth, and ends with God saying, “It’s all good.”
So what happened? There’s a lot that’s good—sunrises, sunsets, music, art, mathematics, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream—but there’s also a lot that’s bad—earthquakes, famines, cancer, heart disease, American Idol—and that can make us wonder if the story we’re living in is really going to have any kind of happy ending.
Our gospel reading tells a story, a small part of the story of Jesus. This story has two main characters: Jesus, whom we know a lot about, and Nicodemus, about whom we know almost nothing. He was, John says, a Pharisee and a leader of the Jews, and later Jesus calls him “a teacher of Israel,” so we know he was a pretty smart guy and important in his way. But let’s face it, we probably never would have heard of him if he hadn’t come to Jesus that night.
What Jesus says to Nicodemus shakes him up and causes him to question his own story. “You have to be born again,” Jesus says, and Nicodemus says, “How can a grown man be born again?” That’s not the way it works. You get one chance. You’re born, you grow up, you get old, you die. The arrow only goes in one direction. But what Jesus says is that God is offering you a chance to start over. In fact, he says, it’s not an option: “no one can see the Kingdom of God without being born again.” Unlike some modern preachers, Jesus is not real specific about how this being born again business works. In fact, he says, it’s a mysterious thing, involving the Holy Spirit, which is like the wind: you can hear it and feel it but you can’t see it. You understand the wind by its results, and Jesus says it’s that way with the Spirit, too. You can’t see the Spirit, but you can experience the Spirit’s presence in your life and you can see the Spirit’s work in the lives of other people.
See, God loves the world. He’s disappointed in it a lot of the time, but he loves it. He made it and he plans to redeem it. And what he wants from you is for you to be part of the story he’s telling, and that story is anything but boring.
This Story is of a God who made the universe and everything in it. He did this for love, because he wanted to share love with other beings. The beings he created, human beings, turned away from his love and threatened to spoil his creation. But this God was not so easily defeated. Out of all the people of the earth, he called one man and one woman, Abraham and Sarah, and made them a People, a Nation with whom he shared his vision for the whole human race. This nation came to be called Israel. They, too, turned away from his love and threatened to spoil his vision. But this God was not so easily defeated. At the right time, he sent his Son to bring human beings back to himself. The only way the Son could do this was to die, but he was willing to do even that if it would save the people God had made. And now there is a new people in the world, a people who follow the Son of God. They, too, are always turning away from God's love and threatening God's purpose. He continues to forgive and nurture and challenge his people, because he plans someday to make a new heaven and a new earth for them, and he wants them to be ready. In the meantime he wants his new people to act like that new heaven and new earth is already here, and show the kind of love that he has shown them from the very beginning.
That's The Story.
You're part of it, and so am I. Find your place in the story, and, whatever you do, don’t make it boring. Donald Miller changed his life. He tracked down the father he hadn’t seen since he was a child, he joined a cross-country bike ride to raise money for charity, he started a program called The Mentoring Project that matches up fatherless boys with men who will support and nurture them. And he keeps writing books like A Million Miles in a Thousand Years.
You may never ride a bicycle across country or start a nationwide program to help other people or write a book. But you have gifts that no one else has, experiences that no one else is having, dreams that only you can dream. God has given you those gifts and those dreams so that you can make use of those experiences. You can only do it when you’re part of God’s story. Go in peace, live your story, and your story will touch the world in ways you can’t imagine.
A Baccalaureate Sermon for the Ar-We-Va High School Class of 2010
Genesis 1:1-2:2
Revelation 5:1-14
John 3:1-17
The world is full of stories.
There are jokes, novels, fairy tales, epic poems, parables, histories, biographies and a dozen other kinds of story I can’t think of right now.
There's your story.
And there's my story.
Donald Miller says that the most important thing we can do with your life is to make a good story out of it. But most of us don’t pay any attention to the story our lives are telling. Donald Miller says that he began to think about his life as story when he was contacted by a producer who wanted to make his book, Blue Like Jazz, into a movie. Since the book was based on his own life, he had some pretty strong ideas about how it should go. But the producer and the screenwriter convinced him that if they just filmed his life the way it happened, it would be—well, dull. Steve, the producer, put it to him this way:
“While you’ve written a good book, thoughts don’t translate onto the screen very well. The audience can’t get inside your head like they can in a book. They will be restless. They won’t engage. Trying to be true to the book is like asking people to read your mind. A story has to move in real life and real time. It’s all about action.”
“You think they might be bored if we just show my life the way it is,” I clarified. I guess I was asking for reassurance that my life was okay.
“I think they’d stab each other in the necks with drinking straws,” Steve said. “Nothing against your book. It’s a fine book,” he added after I’d sat silent for a moment.
I imagined people stabbing each other with straws.
“You in?” Steve asked.
“With their drinking straws?” I asked.
“Crazy, right? We can’t let that happen...”
I thought about it for a moment. I thought about artistic integrity. I was going to tell him I needed a couple weeks to consider the idea, but then he said how much he’d pay me, so I told him I’d do it. (Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, p.20)
In the process of writing the screenplay, Miller realized two things. One, that his life was boring, and two, that he had the chance to edit his life. In movies, editing involves taking the thousands of feet of film and cutting it and fitting it together so the story flows, makes sense, moves along, and doesn’t inspire people to stab each other in the neck with their drinking straws.
Of course our stories as we live them out are a lot messier than any movie. Things happen to us that we don’t choose and can’t foresee. We are given and denied opportunities; we make some good and bad choices that have consequences that we have to live with; we have a set of gifts and limitations that we can’t do much about. But that doesn’t mean we are stuck with what we’ve got.
The world is full of stories; there’s your story, and there’s my story, and over all our stories there is God’s story, which is a lot more exciting than the most exciting human story.
God’s story begins before the beginning, but our story begins in the beginning, as we heard from our first Scripture reading. It begins with God creating the heavens and the earth, and ends with God saying, “It’s all good.”
So what happened? There’s a lot that’s good—sunrises, sunsets, music, art, mathematics, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream—but there’s also a lot that’s bad—earthquakes, famines, cancer, heart disease, American Idol—and that can make us wonder if the story we’re living in is really going to have any kind of happy ending.
Our gospel reading tells a story, a small part of the story of Jesus. This story has two main characters: Jesus, whom we know a lot about, and Nicodemus, about whom we know almost nothing. He was, John says, a Pharisee and a leader of the Jews, and later Jesus calls him “a teacher of Israel,” so we know he was a pretty smart guy and important in his way. But let’s face it, we probably never would have heard of him if he hadn’t come to Jesus that night.
What Jesus says to Nicodemus shakes him up and causes him to question his own story. “You have to be born again,” Jesus says, and Nicodemus says, “How can a grown man be born again?” That’s not the way it works. You get one chance. You’re born, you grow up, you get old, you die. The arrow only goes in one direction. But what Jesus says is that God is offering you a chance to start over. In fact, he says, it’s not an option: “no one can see the Kingdom of God without being born again.” Unlike some modern preachers, Jesus is not real specific about how this being born again business works. In fact, he says, it’s a mysterious thing, involving the Holy Spirit, which is like the wind: you can hear it and feel it but you can’t see it. You understand the wind by its results, and Jesus says it’s that way with the Spirit, too. You can’t see the Spirit, but you can experience the Spirit’s presence in your life and you can see the Spirit’s work in the lives of other people.
See, God loves the world. He’s disappointed in it a lot of the time, but he loves it. He made it and he plans to redeem it. And what he wants from you is for you to be part of the story he’s telling, and that story is anything but boring.
This Story is of a God who made the universe and everything in it. He did this for love, because he wanted to share love with other beings. The beings he created, human beings, turned away from his love and threatened to spoil his creation. But this God was not so easily defeated. Out of all the people of the earth, he called one man and one woman, Abraham and Sarah, and made them a People, a Nation with whom he shared his vision for the whole human race. This nation came to be called Israel. They, too, turned away from his love and threatened to spoil his vision. But this God was not so easily defeated. At the right time, he sent his Son to bring human beings back to himself. The only way the Son could do this was to die, but he was willing to do even that if it would save the people God had made. And now there is a new people in the world, a people who follow the Son of God. They, too, are always turning away from God's love and threatening God's purpose. He continues to forgive and nurture and challenge his people, because he plans someday to make a new heaven and a new earth for them, and he wants them to be ready. In the meantime he wants his new people to act like that new heaven and new earth is already here, and show the kind of love that he has shown them from the very beginning.
That's The Story.
You're part of it, and so am I. Find your place in the story, and, whatever you do, don’t make it boring. Donald Miller changed his life. He tracked down the father he hadn’t seen since he was a child, he joined a cross-country bike ride to raise money for charity, he started a program called The Mentoring Project that matches up fatherless boys with men who will support and nurture them. And he keeps writing books like A Million Miles in a Thousand Years.
You may never ride a bicycle across country or start a nationwide program to help other people or write a book. But you have gifts that no one else has, experiences that no one else is having, dreams that only you can dream. God has given you those gifts and those dreams so that you can make use of those experiences. You can only do it when you’re part of God’s story. Go in peace, live your story, and your story will touch the world in ways you can’t imagine.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Fairly Good Ministry
The late Charles Schultz, creator of “Peanuts” with its immortal cast of misfit characters, once described cartooning as a “fairly” sort of business. He went on to say that if you were a great writer, you would write novels, essays, short stories; if you were a great artist you’d paint or draw or sculpt; if you were a great comedian you’d do standup or make funny movies. A cartoonist has to be able to do all those things, not spectacularly well but fairly well: write fairly well, draw fairly well, and be fairly funny.
Pastoral ministry as most of us practice it is like that. If you were a brilliant scholar you’d teach in a seminary and write books; if you were a brilliant counselor you’d be in a teaching hospital or private practice; if you were a brilliant speaker you’d be on television. As it is, you need to be a fairly good scholar, a fairly good counselor, and a fairly good speaker, and at the same time be a fairly good teacher, administrator, and visionary. Sometimes we think, as Ernie Campbell once said, that if we could shut ourselves up during the week and spend all our time working on our sermons we could be really brilliant preachers, but it doesn’t work that way. We learn to preach not only by studying and crafting our messages but also by getting to know the people we are preaching to. (You will note that unlike some people I have no qualms about using a preposition to end a sentence with) Tom Long says that the best preaching takes place in small to mid-sized churches and is done by preachers who have lived with the congregation for a fair amount of time. Having been in Presbyteries with large congregations and having been preached to (or at) by preachers who served churches of all different sizes, I have to agree. Generally speaking it was the pastors of the small churches whose sermons were most likely to hit home.
So you’re not Walter Brueggemann or Howard Clinebell or Barbara Brown Taylor. You are who you are, called to do what you are called to do, maybe not brilliant at any one thing but fairly good at many things—and most of the time that’s just what the church needs.
Pastoral ministry as most of us practice it is like that. If you were a brilliant scholar you’d teach in a seminary and write books; if you were a brilliant counselor you’d be in a teaching hospital or private practice; if you were a brilliant speaker you’d be on television. As it is, you need to be a fairly good scholar, a fairly good counselor, and a fairly good speaker, and at the same time be a fairly good teacher, administrator, and visionary. Sometimes we think, as Ernie Campbell once said, that if we could shut ourselves up during the week and spend all our time working on our sermons we could be really brilliant preachers, but it doesn’t work that way. We learn to preach not only by studying and crafting our messages but also by getting to know the people we are preaching to. (You will note that unlike some people I have no qualms about using a preposition to end a sentence with) Tom Long says that the best preaching takes place in small to mid-sized churches and is done by preachers who have lived with the congregation for a fair amount of time. Having been in Presbyteries with large congregations and having been preached to (or at) by preachers who served churches of all different sizes, I have to agree. Generally speaking it was the pastors of the small churches whose sermons were most likely to hit home.
So you’re not Walter Brueggemann or Howard Clinebell or Barbara Brown Taylor. You are who you are, called to do what you are called to do, maybe not brilliant at any one thing but fairly good at many things—and most of the time that’s just what the church needs.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Henri Nouwen on Vocation
Found this in my reading this morning:
I know now that I have to speak from eternity into time, from the lasting joy into the passing realities of our short existence in this world, from the house of love into the houses of fear, from God’s abode into the dwellings of human beings. I am well aware of the enormity of this vocation. Still, I am confident that it is the only way for me. One could call it the “prophetic” vision: looking at people and this world through the eyes of God.
Is this a realistic possibility for a human being? More important: Is it a true option for me? This is not an intellectual question. It is a question of vocation. I am called to enter into the inner sanctuary of my own being where God has chosen to dwell. The only way to that place is prayer, unceasing prayer. Many struggles and much pain can clear the way, but I am certain that only unceasing prayer can let me enter it. - Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son, pp.17-18
I know now that I have to speak from eternity into time, from the lasting joy into the passing realities of our short existence in this world, from the house of love into the houses of fear, from God’s abode into the dwellings of human beings. I am well aware of the enormity of this vocation. Still, I am confident that it is the only way for me. One could call it the “prophetic” vision: looking at people and this world through the eyes of God.
Is this a realistic possibility for a human being? More important: Is it a true option for me? This is not an intellectual question. It is a question of vocation. I am called to enter into the inner sanctuary of my own being where God has chosen to dwell. The only way to that place is prayer, unceasing prayer. Many struggles and much pain can clear the way, but I am certain that only unceasing prayer can let me enter it. - Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son, pp.17-18
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Following the Psalter
In addition to reading the Daily Lectionary readings most days, I also work my way through the Psalter on a monthly basis, using a system I found in the Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church. I think the idea of doing that was first suggested to me by Eugene Peterson in Answering God, his book on the Psalms. I find using the whole Psalter more spiritually nourishing than using just the selections in the Daily Lectionary.
Anyway, reading all the Psalms over and over again has given me an appreciation, not only for individual psalms but also for the person or persons responsible for the Psalter in its final form. I am impressed, and blessed, by the rhythm of the collection: the way psalms with similar themes are grouped together, but also the way that we are not allowed to wallow in lament, complaint, or praise, but move back and forth between the varying moods and emotions that we all relate to at one time or another. John Calvin puts it well in a famous passage:
One thing I note every time through the Psalter is that Psalm 22 and 23 are always read together. Psalm 23 is the psalm we all run to, especially at a time of death; Psalm 22 is the psalm we tend to stay away from, except on Good Friday—and even then, we’re not too comfortable with it. But the compiler of the Psalter helps us to see that forsakenness and trust can exist side by side: in the same church, in the same family, even in the same person. Psalm 22, with its excruciating opening cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” ends with words of hope, leading us into the reassurance of Psalm 23: “The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want.” 23 is all the more powerful when read in company with 22. It’s probably worth noting that both are attributed to David. Whether David actually wrote both or not, they witness to the kind of faith we see in David.
Most of us get to read the 23rd Psalm more than we’d like, since it gets chosen a lot for funerals. Sometimes the reasons for that are pretty shallow--e.g. “it’s the only passage of Scripture I can identify”--but sometimes they are profound. I did a funeral this morning for an 81-year-old woman whose Confirmation passage was Psalm 23, and it fit her like a glove. Thanks be to God.
Anyway, reading all the Psalms over and over again has given me an appreciation, not only for individual psalms but also for the person or persons responsible for the Psalter in its final form. I am impressed, and blessed, by the rhythm of the collection: the way psalms with similar themes are grouped together, but also the way that we are not allowed to wallow in lament, complaint, or praise, but move back and forth between the varying moods and emotions that we all relate to at one time or another. John Calvin puts it well in a famous passage:
I have been accustomed to call this book, I think not inappropriately, “An Anatomy of all the Parts of the Soul;” for there is not an emotion of which any one can be conscious that is not here represented as in a mirror. Or rather, the Holy Spirit has here drawn to the life all the griefs, sorrows, fears, doubts, hopes, cares, perplexities, in short, all the distracting emotions with which the minds of men are wont to be agitated. The other parts of Scripture contain the commandments which God enjoined his servants to announce to us. But here the prophets themselves, seeing they are exhibited to us as speaking to God, and laying open all their inmost thoughts and affections, call, or rather draw, each of us to the examination of himself in particulars in order that none of the many infirmities to which we are subject, and of the many vices with which we abound, may remain concealed. (Preface to A Commentary on the Psalms)
One thing I note every time through the Psalter is that Psalm 22 and 23 are always read together. Psalm 23 is the psalm we all run to, especially at a time of death; Psalm 22 is the psalm we tend to stay away from, except on Good Friday—and even then, we’re not too comfortable with it. But the compiler of the Psalter helps us to see that forsakenness and trust can exist side by side: in the same church, in the same family, even in the same person. Psalm 22, with its excruciating opening cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” ends with words of hope, leading us into the reassurance of Psalm 23: “The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want.” 23 is all the more powerful when read in company with 22. It’s probably worth noting that both are attributed to David. Whether David actually wrote both or not, they witness to the kind of faith we see in David.
Most of us get to read the 23rd Psalm more than we’d like, since it gets chosen a lot for funerals. Sometimes the reasons for that are pretty shallow--e.g. “it’s the only passage of Scripture I can identify”--but sometimes they are profound. I did a funeral this morning for an 81-year-old woman whose Confirmation passage was Psalm 23, and it fit her like a glove. Thanks be to God.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
No Post-Easter Letdown
Charles Schultz, in one of his inimitable "Peanuts" comic strips, coined the expression "Post-Christmas Letdown." Schultz may have been the one to name it, but we've all felt it: that feeling of disappointment that comes when all the services are over, all the presents have been opened and the wrappings discarded, and we are back at work with nothing to look forward to but three months of Winter. The tree may still be up, but it's looking a little droopy, even if it's artificial. Nobody really likes those few days after Christmas.
But yesterday I realized that there's no corresponding Post-Easter Letdown. That may be because we don't overload Easter with unrealistic expectations the way we do Christmas, but I think it's something more. Easter points us forward in a way that Christmas, as we usually celebrate it, doesn't. The eschatological emphasis of the Advent texts tries to drag us into the future, but old habits are hard to break and we often find ourselves longing for Christmases past--or at least I do.
Easter, to be sure, has a strong historical component. We wouldn't celebrate it if Jesus hadn't been raised from the dead at a particular time in a particular place. Easter both completes the story begun at Christmas and opens a new chapter. Because Jesus is alive, the past is prologue and the future is open. Jesus said it this way: “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you...Receive the Holy Spirit.”
Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again. On to Pentecost!
But yesterday I realized that there's no corresponding Post-Easter Letdown. That may be because we don't overload Easter with unrealistic expectations the way we do Christmas, but I think it's something more. Easter points us forward in a way that Christmas, as we usually celebrate it, doesn't. The eschatological emphasis of the Advent texts tries to drag us into the future, but old habits are hard to break and we often find ourselves longing for Christmases past--or at least I do.
Easter, to be sure, has a strong historical component. We wouldn't celebrate it if Jesus hadn't been raised from the dead at a particular time in a particular place. Easter both completes the story begun at Christmas and opens a new chapter. Because Jesus is alive, the past is prologue and the future is open. Jesus said it this way: “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you...Receive the Holy Spirit.”
Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again. On to Pentecost!
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Prayer and Ministry
The discipline of leading all our people with their struggles into the gentle and humble heart of God is the discipline of prayer as well as the discipline of ministry. As long as ministry only means that we worry a lot about people and their problems; as long as it means an endless number of activities which we can hardly coordinate, we are still very much dependent on our own narrow and anxious heart. But when our worries are led to the heart of God and there become prayer, then ministry and prayer become two manifestations of the same all-embracing love of God. - Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart, p.88
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