As the Years Go By...

I always assumed it would get easier. I would gain a better understanding of the Gospel, of the Church, of myself and of other people. I would gain skills that would smooth out the rough spots of ministry. I would learn not to take defeats and setbacks personally. I would not need to rely as much on other people’s affirmation because I would have learned to rely more on God.

In fact, it’s gotten harder.

Partly it’s because the Church I was trained to serve no longer exists. Partly it’s because there are issues in society that weren’t there when I began. But mostly it’s because I find myself going deeper all the time, so I shouldn’t be surprised that it doesn’t get easier.

Yes, I’ve gained skills that make me a better pastor than I was 30 years ago. For example, I’ve become more empathetic. But empathy is hard work. It’s pretty easy to pop into a hospital room, say something encouraging, offer a prayer, and leave. When you begin to put yourself in the place of a suffering person, you can’t do that. It gets harder.

And it’s gotten harder because I’m not so cocksure about some things as I once was. I have to think more, listen more, take more time to make up my mind. Even preaching has gotten harder because, though I know the Bible a lot better than I did 30 years ago I’m less satisfied with cliches and easy answers.

I always assumed it would get easier. Thank God it hasn’t.

Turning Off the Sermon Switch

C.H. Spurgeon, the Victorian-era “Prince of the Pulpit,” writes in his little book of advice for preachers, Lectures to My Students, of the need of being “sermon-minded.” You ought always to be on the lookout for ideas, he writes, no matter what you are doing, whether reading, conversing, working in your garden or taking a walk. Nearly everything you see and do is potential fodder for a sermon, and since you are preaching perhaps 150 times in a single year (remember that in Spurgeon’s day preachers typically had two services on Sunday and one midweek), you will need a lot of fodder.

Generally, that’s good advice, and today we would add watching television, going to movies, and surfing the internet to Spurgeon’s list of activities. Anyone who preaches on a regular basis can tell you that they get ideas for themes and illustrations from all those sources.

The only trouble is that it makes it hard to just read, just watch television, just see a movie. The things I do to take a break from work too often feed back into work. Saturday, with everything done for Sunday, I was watering the plants in front of the house when I found myself reflecting, not for the first time, on how efficiently plants channel water from the leaves to the roots. It occurred to me that that particular insight would fit into my sermon for Sunday, and I was back at work again. Having those ideas in the middle of a movie is even worse. Yes, some of those ideas are great, but what happened to recreation and relaxation? Is there any way to turn off the sermon switch?

Maybe, just as I need to discipline myself to work, so I need to discipline myself not to work, to push those really great ideas aside when I am supposed to be talking my Sabbath rest, believing that the idea will still be there on Monday morning, or when I get back from vacation.

Speaking of vacation, I will be gone next week. Please pray for me that I don’t think about work until June 14.

Nouwen on Forgiveness

One of the greatest challenges of the spiritual life is to receive God’s forgiveness. There is something in us humans that keeps us clinging to our sins and prevents us from letting God erase our past and offer us a completely new beginning. Sometimes it even seems as though I want to prove to God that my darkness is too great to overcome. While God wants to restore me to the full dignity of sonship, I keep insisting that I will settle for being a hired servant. But do I truly want to be restored to the full responsibility of the son? Do I truly want to be so totally forgiven that a completely new way of living becomes possible? Do I trust myself and such a radical reclamation? Do I want to break away from my deep-rooted rebellion against God and surrender myself so absolutely to God’s love that a new person can emerge? Receiving forgiveness requires a total willingness to let God be God and do all the healing, restoring, and renewing. As long as I want to do even part of that myself, I end up with partial solutions, such as becoming a hired servant. As a hired servant, I can still keep my distance, still revolt, reject, strike, run away, or complain about my pay. As the beloved son, I have to claim my full dignity and begin preparing myself to become the father. - Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son, p.53, my emphasis

Overworked and Underutilized

I’m feeling a bit overworked these days, and I wonder how much of it I’m bringing on myself. Just the other day I had the passage in my daily reading about how Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro, convinced Moses that his style of administration was all wrong because he was trying to do everything, acting “as judge for the people, while the people stood around him from morning until evening.” (Exodus 18:13) Jethro’s words to Moses are a model of brevity: “What you are doing is not good. You will surely wear yourself out, both you and these people with you. For the task is too heavy for you; you cannot do it alone.” (Exodus 18:17-18 NRS) We pastors and CLP’s (and committee chairs, for that matter) should probably have this engraved and put someplace where we can see it every day. When we try to do everything ourselves, we not only wear ourselves out, we wear everybody else out, too.

Jethro’s advice to Moses could come out of a 21st-century administrative manual:

You should...look for able men among all the people, men who fear God, are trustworthy, and hate dishonest gain; set such men over them as officers over thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens. Let them sit as judges for the people at all times; let them bring every important case to you, but decide every minor case themselves. So it will be easier for you, and they will bear the burden with you. If you do this, and God so commands you, then you will be able to endure, and all these people will go to their home in peace. (Exodus 18:21-23 NRS)

This principle, of course, is foundational to the Presbyterian system of Ruling Elders and Teaching Elders, of the divisions of authority and responsibility between pastor and Session, but how often have we seen a kind of “responsibility creep” taking place, especially when we have served a church for several years. Some pastors, of course, covet that control and do their best to make it happen, but for many of us it sneaks up on us without our being aware of it at the time.

So from time to time I need to step back, hard as that is, and take a look at everything I’m doing. How much of this is stuff that someone else really should be doing? Recall how the apostles handled the Great Potluck Controversy, the first thing that threatened to split the Church before it really got started:

In those days when the number of disciples was increasing, the Hellenistic Jews among them complained against the Hebraic Jews because their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food. So the Twelve gathered all the disciples together and said, “It would not be right for us to neglect the ministry of the word of God in order to wait on tables. Brothers and sisters, choose seven men from among you who are known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom. We will turn this responsibility over to them and will give our attention to prayer and the ministry of the word.” (Acts 6:1-4 TNIV)

I don’t think the apostles were saying, “we’re too important to bother ourselves with trivial stuff like feeding people.” I think they recognized that they were called to do one thing, and that if they did everything, two things would happen: one is that nothing would get done very well, and the other is that other people in the fellowship would never get a chance to live out their own calls. Look what happened after the seven men were chosen: “The word of God spread. The number of disciples in Jerusalem increased rapidly, and a large number of priests became obedient to the faith.” (Acts 6:7 TNIV)

Well, now that I’ve written that, it’s time for me to take my own advice. I’ll let you know what I find out.

The Call

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.”

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.

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.