the personal touch

I spend a small amount of time considering the question of “legacy.” Not in the presidential sense but rather in the sense that everything I do contains a little bit of me, my thoughts and habits and so simply by breathing in the air in a particular place (church) I tend to have an effect on the culture by a) being in a leadership role and b) by portraying to the world my own worldview.

Each end every day I am modeling something, concern, care, selfishness (hey, not every day is a good one) without any intention of doing so as all of us do and so there is the conundrum of being a role model and creating a culture in subtle ways while all the while trying to be intentional about actions and behaviors. There are limits to how much self-analysis I can manage in a given day and so, so much of this behavior is unconscious and unevaluated that is weirds me out to think what it is that might come about because of this fact of life; that we create reality by living in it.

The thing that brought this to mind is that I am feeling a bit nostalgic these days and have struck on the idea of casting back into memory and resurrecting habits and traditions of past years to make Christmas into a moment that we can inhabit not just for the season but also for the whole year. What would it be like to have that kind of child-like anticipation of graces and joys to come? Could we recapture that without turning it into something else, the typical impatience that we all suffer through with the help of the media constantly telling us that we deserve a break today, not tomorrow today!

It could be that since I was raised in a presents-on-Christmas-morning household, that I have simply learned to be patient about those kinds of things. There was no rush, the morning would come when it came and that was all there was to it. The morning could be bleary eyed for my parents, yet joyful exuberance for my brother and me.  Having never owned a cell-phone I was actually happy with new sweaters. Knowing that we were not wealthy (as much as we think that we didn’t know, we all did, we had wealthy classmates and they got different, better stuff) we knew that we got the things that we needed and we looked for that morning to dawn with eagerness.

simple  childlike  free

Did that just disappear with childhood?

Gracious Lord, giver of life and of love and of freedom in Christ have mercy on us. Show us the way to be at peace with our world instead of at war with it, constantly having to seek advantage. Let us know the sweetness of just family and just love and just hope, time spent in community, after all, “it is not good for people to be alone” and we’ve lost that a little bit. Show us the way.

Dissident Discipleship

I’ve been reading this book and I commend it to you. It describes a progression of belief that I’d like to lift up to you, to see if it resonates at all. The book focuses on what the author calls “polarities” of discipleship defined thusly:

• monopolar – self orientation “holiness of the moment and the person”
• bipolar – acknowledgiong God as the “other” who introduces humility into the equation – reflective discipleship
• tripolar – bringing in the other in humanity into the equation, recognizing that our experience of God is defined in our love for other people

All three are lifted up as pieties that we can see out in the world and tripolar spirituality if hailed as the most completely biblical and faithful example. The Anabaptists are given as the main modern adherents of this kind of spirituality (if you want a glimpse of what tripolar spirituality would look like in action, think of the Amish response to the man who came in and killed the schoolgirls in Pennsylvania. That is defining love for God in love for others) and he had once taught at a Mennonite seminary.

He proposes the following sentences as indicative of the progression into and through the various polarities:

• I believe the story of Jesus
• I believe in Jesus
• I believe Jesus
• I believe what Jesus believed

How many of these can you lay claim to?
How do you understand the statements as they reflect your life, your behavior, your hopes for the future?

God of life and light, let us see. Let us see you in all that we do. Let us hear you in our voice as we proclaim your salvation. Let us know and welcome you as we have been known and welcomed.

The sight of God

I was chatting with a member the other day and I realized that I had been in the presence of Christ the whole time. In both the “When two or more are gathered” sense as well as in the presence of one who brought Christ into the darker spaces of creation and made them light.

Their spouse was in the hospital and in some despondency. This person not only visited in the way that anyone (including myself) would do, but actually made it clear that they were present in the room, available and vulnerable to the person hooked up to the tubes and wires. This was driven home to me in the applying of lotion to the feet. Needless to say biblical images flooded my mind at the time and I couldn’t find words to intrude upon that moment (thank God) but watching one person tenderly anoint the feet of their beloved made the act of Maundy Thursday seem all the more potent to me. I cannot wait for the opportunity to feel that way again, even if only as the shadow of this very personal and true moment.

It came home again when this person missed church one morning. I saw them later and asked if everything was alright and they told me that they had been helping their spouse shower at the hospital. Nurses are available for that kind of thing, but it is so dehumanizing to have to go through it with all of the tubes and wires that the comfort of having someone who truly loves you present to help you, to hold you and to see you through what might otherwise be an embarassing moment is remarkably potent.

I didn’t say so, but I think that this person was in far closer proximity to the love of Christ than any sermon I have ever been blessed with by the Spirit could bring about.

How do you compete with those moments? How can you bring the love of God home any more than the simple acts of devoted love that one person can be to another. The simple answer is that you can’t. I’ll continue to see these moments and feel somehow less than those around me, but also feel that maybe, just maybe continuing to hear the word of life, continuing to hear the love of God made new in the promises preached from the lips of as humble a servant as myself can show that we are the body of Christ, equal in stature and righteounsess and that we have been given the power to bring Christ into whatever darkness presents itself and to trust that the light of Christ can illumine that darkness and make people into what God had intended from the beginning.

When I think it depends on me, Lord, send me an angel. Not a fiery seraph or a burning bush but flesh and bone and heart turned to love by the promises of Christ alive and abiding within them. Send us all such an angel so that we can see the promises being kept in the love of one to another in your name and that we may see freedom for what it is, freedom from the need to surpass or supplant, freedom from envy or hate, freedom from pity or condescension; and freedom for service, love and compassion in this world.

Doubt

So now I doubt the call.

How can I be so wrong? How can I be so unfailingly sinful and yet presume to lead a congregation where people expect me to be one thing or another but since I’m none of those things,  are bound to be disappointed?

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Romans 7:15

I’m stuck. Wanting approval, wanting to be the person who leads people in the right path but being the person whose errors haunt him. Is the sermon good enough? Am I being harsh to this person or that one? Am I spending enough time visiting? Am I spending too much time on “projects” that are interesting to me but do little to serve the kingdom?

So it does make me doubt the call. Not the reality of the call, I do feel called to ministry , but rather my suitability for ministry. I know that the stock Lutheran answer is that “none of us is truly worthy, yet all are worthy in Christ,” and I get that. But it’s the lack of skills, the bungling, the stupidity that haunts, not the “sinful nature” argument.

All I have is you Lord, and all I have is yours. Take it and point it in the right direction because I cannot find it myself.

“Whatever you do, DON’T . . .”

” . . . change ANYTHING in the first year in the parish.”

Words from not just my internship supervisor but also from every pastor at the table when asked for the most important piece of advice that they could give. I wonder if ANYONE else at that table actually followed that advice.

Well, the first year is coming to an end (Sept. 6th) and I’m finally beginning to see some of the wisdom in that warning.

I’ve spent a year trying to see how the Church’s vision, which they touted quite a bit, was being lived in the pews, a year trying to see where things might be changed or altered in the future, a year listening to those voices, maybe a little too much.

Because you can’t just sit there. I appreciate the advice, and in a lot of cases (like changing hymnals, or switching worship styles etc) its very good advice because you need to learn what the congregation cares about and you need to earn a little credibility. But it tempts you to try and let them show you these things, when the truth of the matter is, you need to encourage, nag, cajole and flirt them into showing you what they care about. Otherwise, people have the tendency to fall into unexamined and unexplained habits, and I for one find myself confused a lot of the time, mystified that people will attach a great deal of importance to one ritual while ignoring another without so much as a mention of it, ever.

I’ve fallen into the pit of that thinking recently. I’ve tried to let them show me. But what a lot of people do when someone lets them go, is that they go, they find it hard to work up the passion unless someone is encouraging them, and so things languish somewhat. This has happened to varying extents throughout the church structure and it is time for it to STOP.

Energy flows both ways but I have been a little too passive, plus the one year mark is coming up so I don’t even have the advice of my past to stop me. I love this place and I love the vision that they have set before them, to reach out, to grow the kingdom of God, to provide a place for young people to be touched by the grace of God and it is past timeto start letting that show.

set my butt on fire Lord, let the fire I feel for you and your kingdom be the model for the passion for your mission in the world, shown in the vision of the faithful and enacted in our lives each and every day. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart and the works of my hands be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer and may ourefforts honor and serve you in this world so that all may hear of the feast that is to come and know of your love.

Heck of a week . . .

So we were planning the church Open House for Saturday. There’s an awful lot of coordination required and I have been blessed by having agreat group here at church who did a spectacular job of putting the thing together (thanks Debbie, Janet, Bryanna, Tracy and Mary and everyone else who lent a hand).

Sometime in the middle of the two-week initial carb-fast for the insulin-resistant/South Beach diet I developed a histamine reaction to something and got a yucky-looking case of the hives. This compounded an already lousy disposition because of a cold that I had been developing so now there’s the wondering whether or not the residual stuffiness is because of allergies or just left-over cold.

Dad and Florence were in town, that was very nice and we got to go up to the ranch and relax a little, walk around,just be away for a few hours. We found a new and wonderful restaurant and all in all I had a good visit.

But I’m unsettled . . .

I guess it’s just uncertainty eroding some of that gung-ho mentality. We’ve got to get the people up and out a little, and we’ve got to spend some money to do it, but it is an odd feeling to do it.

But we can’t keep sitting up here quietly, waiting for people to notice us because eventually moss will cover us and we’ll dissappear. It’s just an odd feeling for someone with no extra money to spend in my own life, to be investing like this, trusting in God to “give the increase.” Time to practice what I preach I guess . . .

and then I read this from a classmate, Bono on faith? truly fabulous.

Precious light of all creation, stop me. Stop me from trying to see the results of my words, of my efforts and of my faith. Remind me that it is your Spirit that calls, gathers and enlightens not me. When we pull our talent from the ground, do not let us hold it close and admire it, but drive it from our hands and into the world, let us take what we have and invest it in creation so that what we touch may bear the mark of your love and your holy name.

oddly unsatisfying

I am somwhat ashamed of this feeling but it’s an odd feeling to be ready to provide pastoral support and to find no desire for it.

I got a call from the hospital about 10 minutes before I was going to go home and get ready to go to the ranch. There had been a baby who died, was born dead and the family had asked for clergy to come and bless the baby, not baptize, just bless.

Cool, I did my CPE at Abbott Northwestern Hospital and a fair bit of my on-call responses were to Children’s right next door. I rushed home and changed (I was already changed for going to the cabin) and drove out to the Hospital.

I arrived and the people were very sweet. They already had two children but when she had arrived, she thought she was going into premature labor. There was no heartbeat, and the induction brought out the poor little boy. They were very calm. They asked that a blessing be said for the baby and I reached back to the naming ceremony from Children’s Hospital and spoke the words, their comfort obvious and the sentiment true. I have no idea whether or not my words reached them, but they seemed to reach me and I teared up.

Then they said thanks and told me that this was all that they wanted and said I could go.

I  was a little taken aback. It was an indictment of entering into someone else’s space with expectations of your own and then feeling put out when your own expectations aren’t fulfilled. It’s also an indictment of the very human need to see some kind of result from your efforts. I wanted to see some kind of Spirit activity.

Back to prayer . . .

Precious Lord,  empty my heart of myself so that there is room for others and so that my own concerns do not cloud my caring for them. Fill my eyes with their faces because in their faces there is you, and it is to you that I must always return, indeed it is to you that we all must return. Allow your Word to fall from my lips unhindered and remind me that this living word carries its own power and doesn’t need my help. When I misstep, call me back and when I return send me out so that I can be our face in the world even as I see your face in those to whom I minister.

Communion, how do YOU do it?

I’m (finally) realizing what n exercise in vanity this thing is. There are a fair nmber of people who read it all the time, but I get a fair number of responses via e-mail instead of inside the forum. The people who do this are undoubtedly feeling a little put-upon that I’m advertising this, but since I won’t use their names, and they don’t post, they have nothing to fear.  The fact of the matter is that I don’t think I would want to keep doing this just to hear from (no offense, I love you guys) my colleagues and two members of the church.

I suppose it’s unfair to expect people to adopt this technology with the same joy I have, but it makes me wonder if I’m having any success in trying to help the community trust each other enough to disagree out in the open.

Just depressed, I guess. Maybe it’s part of the whole “professional” hierachy we have bult up in this country. We’ve ceded the discourse on most topics to the “experts” and dropped quietly into the background as if without a master’s degree we don’t have anything to say. We start conversations with stupid phrases like “well, I’m no economist, but” as if you had to be a specialist to realize that free trade is great in abstract but crappy when it costs you your job. Somehow we’ve actually become ashamed to have these opinions unless we have the book smarts to back them up.

I’ve got some people in Bible study who do not have this problem. They say what they think pretty much all of the time and even if they’re open to having their minds changed or their thoughts expanded or shrunk just a little) they’re fearless when they speak about their faith. Why not about worship? or Communion? or Mission? Why the behind the scenes communication?

I don’t get it, but that’s hardly a unique stiuation. As for the title of the post, how do YOU do communion, either in your church or in your heart when you approach the rail?  We alternate between full communion (in the little plastic Jesus cups) and intinction. I’d like to go to common cup being on offer, but that’s an additional assistant and another learning curve and it’ll have to wait for another day. I read in the Lutheran this month a quip from a woman who mourns the loss of monthly communion (she still takes communion only once a month) because she thinks that it makes the sacrament less special. I try (who knows how successfully?) to communicate the universal nature of the Lord’s table, that it is food for all mankind, for the hungry for grace and also the hungry in body, that it might give us a tase of God’s grace that we might feed those in need. How can that be done too often (no matter what Skip Sundberg says)?

I don’t even know where to start, feeling down and wanting to vent, make of it what you will.

Bread of life from heaven. Feed us this day that we may be strong enough in body and in spirit to feed those less fortunate. Show us the way of grace so that we can see in ourselves, the desperate hunger of spirit that might show us the hunger in the flesh of those around us. May we always see our hunger in theirs and seek to share what we have so that both hungers might be eased, until the day when there will be no hunger and no thirst.

How far?

I went to the county mental helath facility the other day. The person I went to see is not a member of the congregation, simply someone who picked our church name out of the phone directory or out of the religion page in the newspaper. She is a challenge. Not only are there some pretty clear signs of mental illness but there are also some signal questions that were asked that lead to the suspicion that she is manipulating the situation and trying to manipulate me into "providing" for her when she is released (if).

In New York there is a list that is maintained in the information desk of every hospital that gives the religious affiliation of each patient who bothered to put something down in the blank. It is available to the pastor if he or she should want to make visits based solely on faith confession.
I think that if I become an intern supervisor, I'll require that my interns make just such visits. They never have to do it again in their ministries, but they should be prepared, we should be prepared, to meet those in need for the first time and begin immediately to minister to them.

But how far are we supposed to go? I know that we're supposed to take up our cross and follow, but you could wear out pretty fast with that kind of plan. I'm working onthe thinking that if I have the resources to do the visit, I should just go (it allowed me to go to a part of town I seldom go to and so I visited another member who had been home bound), and when I run out of resources, that I have to call it quits and deal with the things at home first.

But then there's the guilt at leaving someone without comfort.

But I do love this job/calling whatever. I'd rather do this than anything else, I mean where else is your big dilemma how many people to offer comfort to?

Spread us thin, Lord, but not thin enough to break. Allow us the resilience to spring back into shape each week and continue to walk with you, in you and as you in this world. There are more of them than there are of us Lord, so thin is how we shall be spread, but whatever the shape of our ministry, let the love of Christ shine through us as sunlight bursts forth from the clouds.