Category: Through a Glass Darkly

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Vocation and Healing

My intent wasn't to save the world as much as to heal myself. Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but unsubconsciously, in entering the profession, we must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. But it can also deepen the wound. {Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone}

winn_collier_writer_van_gogh_farmer_at_fireside

Yesterday, a friend asked why I became a pastor. My story's both as dull and as fascinating as every story you'd discover with such a question. My path (and my vocation) has all the holiness, but no more, as my friends who pound hammers, type code, or translate German. Tending to soil or tending to children is no different, other than minor particulars, from tending to souls or words. All of it will make you giddy. All of it will break your heart.

I took up the stole the same way I took up the pen and pretty much the same way (with a few more hairpin curves) I became a husband and then a father. I had a desire I couldn't shake accompanied by a fear I'd screw up and be a fool, two signals (especially when they arrive holding hands) that you're on to something important. I took the step in front of me, and I kept stepping. And here I am with a few scars, a few stories and much, much gratitude.

To me, the more interesting question is: why do I stay a pastor? There are plenty of reasons not to, none of which I'll bore you with here. However, this place, this community, this way I've found to tend to my little plot of earth, is where I've settled. Lest this somehow come across more noble than I intend (or more noble than the truth), let me clarify. I am not a pastor because of a mystical, irrevocable call or due to unrelenting faith. I do not pastor because I possess a driving vision for a new expression of the church of tomorrow. I do not pastor for the pay or the prestige, both of which are (how shall I put this?) … thin.

I am a pastor because this is what, for now, my heart has to give away. I am a pastor because I have found that somehow, as I labor for the mending of other broken and weary souls, I encounter my own mending, my own healing. My sermons do not provide my lectures for the congregation, but rather my questions searching for answers, my convictions born out of travail. I do not pray as one who, with iron-clenched certainty, stares down mysteries; I pray trembling. But I pray and I tremble with tenacious hope. 

Verghese tells us that to live such a way invites both healing and wounding. I believe this will be the experience of every true vocation, every place where, more than merely our skill or expertise, we choose to give away our life and to offer our work and ourselves as fellow humans doing the best we know to follow every scent of grace.

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Songs of Friendship

On my desk sits a picture of me conversing with two friends. We're situated on old pews at the front of an old stone chapel. Gold rays cascade through the row of four stained glass windows perched high, at the rear of the vestry. The light shoots a straight train from those lofty windows down to the tops of our heads, as if the sun wanted to pass a few final blessings before setting. 

Miska took my photograph and printed a line on it reminding me that "to love a person is to learn the song that is in their heart and to sing it to them when they have forgotten." She knows that these friends, along with a few others, do this for me. And I hope I do the same for them.

We all need people to remind us what is true about ourselves, pointing out with great delight our strength and beauty and splendidness. We need people who believe in, and trust, the deep good God Almighty has firmly planted within us. You can go anywhere and hear someone sing a song of rejection or regret, duty or obligation, judgment or dismissal. We need more songs of hope, more songs of everlasting friendship. We need more blessings before the sun sets. 

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Fear Undone

Fear drains life from your soul, like a line tapped into a vein, spilling your blood on the brown dirt. 

Even if fear turns us boisterous, productive or angry, as it does for many, do not mistake this exertion for a good source of energy. This energy is lethal. We may drop a bomb because we fear our enemies. We may build a career because we fear others' dismissive opinions. We may marry because we fear being alone. We may hover over our children because we fear their harm. We may follow religious piety because we fear divine wrath. These fears will get the wheels turning and produce some result, but the final tally will be emptiness and sorrow.

Scripture tells us that the antidote to fear is not, as some might suspect, more courage or more tenacity. We do not conquer fear by conquering fear. The one thing that overwhelms fear (and all the obsession and anxiety it breeds) is love. Love welcomes us the way we are, even with all our idiosyncrasies and failed plans and blundering efforts. Fear says, "I best manage this because no one else will." Love says, "I've got you covered. Take a stroll."

This is another reason why these words are the best news of all: God loves you. Completely.

 

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I Don’t Know

During my 20's and 30's, I had a couple job interviews at churches, and these interviews didn't sit right with me. In each, there was a moment where they asked me something like: "So, what do you plan to do to make our church grow?"

I looked at them blankly. I shuffled. I'm sure I blinked a few times. The question seemed preposterous. I lived in Texas and later, Colorado. These interviews were in … well, a long way from there. And those weekends were the first time I'd ever stepped across the threshold of their fair city. I stumbled about, and eventually gave an answer about needing to learn the people and the place before I could say anything that wouldn't be just me making stuff up. Of course, I never got the job.

I'm older now, a tad wiser. I don't suspect I'll ever find myself in such an interview with such a church again. However, there's plenty of places where pastors gather round the ecclesiastical water cooler and toss back and forth this same sort of drivel.

In the future, I think I'll simply quote Mark 4, shrug my shoulders and say, "Heck if I know."

Then Jesus said, "God's kingdom is like seed thrown on a field by a man who then goes to bed and forgets about it. The seed sprouts and grows—he has no idea how it happens. The earth does it all without his help: first a green stem of grass, then a bud, then the ripened grain. When the grain is fully formed, he reaps—harvest time!

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A Blessing on Father’s Day

Men of tender courage, strong hopes and firm presence: When you see your world – and move into it – you model our God who refused to be aloof and insisted on bold, visible love. With your daily labor, you carve life from the soil of this world. Like God, you bring order from the wild chaos. You name the truth, and your love has the power to touch the deep places of our soul. You are a poet, a craftsman, a priest. You are necessary.

For the ways you take on the weight of this world – and shield others from it,

For the many times you surrender your desires for the good of family,

For your faithfulness to your marriage, in a world that knows less and less about fidelity and loyalty, less about love,

For the times when all you want to do is fling your weary bones on a couch but instead you wrestle or sit down for a tea party or toss a football,

For the moments you’ve fought to the bitter end for what you believe is true and right, even if you lost,

For those of you who bear the scars from your own father,

For those of you who have become father for another,

For sticking around,

For keeping your word,

For laughing – and for being able to laugh at yourself,

For teaching us how to tell the truth, how to say “I’m sorry” and how to cry,

We bless you.

May the God who filled Father Adam with life and who filled King David with wisdom, boldness and tenderness and who brought our Redeemer into the world to enact and demonstrate selfless love, fill you with all grace and joy today. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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Buzzsaw

Why does the journey to the calm, peaceful terrain of our soul often require the most violent encounters? When we desire authentic living and a heart of integrity, when we commit to our true self rather than the many fictitous personas, hold on. We're about to run through a buzzsaw.

We expend extravagant amounts of energy attempting to tightly manage risk, working to craft an impeccable identity and concocting safety by charting the future with us securely at the wheel. Eventually, we recognize the futility, and we take a good look at what our commitments to these illusions have cost us. We're only a shadow of our true person. And we are never at rest.

Now we have a choice. If we choose to be free, which is what it means to be true, we must be courageous. What follows will be a death of old ways and old lies. We may wail and curse and attempt to turn back, but, having tasted something more, we keep going. We want to live. And once we step into the truth and abandon the lies we've crafted, we are graced, here and there, with suprising shots of contented joy. We learn, with practice, not to grasp for this grace. But we do receive it, and we are thankful.

When Jesus said that the seed first had to die before it could live, he wasn't blowing smoke.

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Hear Your Laughter

My wife the poet put beauty to paper with her recent verse. This past weekend, I asked her to recite it for me, twice. I read the piece to a few friends last night, and one friend, Raul, said, "That comes from the heart of an empowered woman." Indeed.

Amid the many lines begging to be savored, she speaks of the invitation to "hear the sound of your own laughter." To listen for someone else's laughter is to delight in them, to take pleasure in their joy and their happiness. I have a friend named Tom whose deep belly guffaw is unmistakable, and it is one of the many things I love about him. When I haven't heard Tom's raucous joy in a while, I miss it.

However, to listen for my own laughter is to take delight in my joy and happiness, to know that anyone who doesn't revel in her own joy can't truly revel in another's.  Watching for my own laughter is to refuse sour spirituality and the false religion of self-flagellation and to believe that God is kind and generous, leaning forward, ready to grin and join the fun — God eager to hear me the way I'm eager to hear Tom.

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Preaching to Bones

I've offered a homily to a tough crowd or two, but nothing like the stone faces Ezekiel met.

In a scene only God and Tim Burton could have dreamed up, God gives Ezekiel a vision of a wide valley knee deep in bones. Brittle corpses picked clean by the vultures and bleached white by the sun. Deader than dead. God queries Ezekiel. "Mortal," God says (and don't you love how God likes to make certain it's clear who's who), "what do you think – could these bones live again?" Ezekiel, who must have been having quite the day, gave the only sane answer. "How could I possibly say? Only you know answers like that."

So God tells Ezekiel to go preach to the dead, dry bones. I could make a too-easy wisecrack about the dry bones sitting in the pew most Sundays, but we all know there are just as many dry bones standing at the pulpit. And too many sermons that have scraped away all the mystery and imagination, leaving nothing but a carcass text and a skeleton congregation, all begging to be put out of their misery. We're all, one way or another, dry bones; and we all need the sermon Ezekiel preached. "This is what the Lord God says to you bones," Ezekiel pronounced. "Live."

Suddenly, there was a noise, "a rattling," says Ezekiel. And those bones shook off death's dust and began to knock together. Awkwardly at first, rickety. Then the toe bones connected to the foot bones. And the foot bones connected to the ankle bones. All the way up to the head bone – they all heard the word of the Lord. What a sight. A preacher could spend his whole life running on the fumes from an altar call like that.

"I will put my Spirit within you," God said. "And you shall live." Wherever we're tired to the bone or worn to the bone, whenever our heart feels like it's got nothing left but cold bones, then we listen to old Ezekiel preach the sermon that really wasn't his sermon at all. And that sermon repeats one word: Live.

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Pentecost: Absence and Creation

Pentecost by Jan Richardson
Jan Richardson

If we want to hear what's on another's heart, we'll have to shut up every now and then. If we are to receive, there has to be some empty space within us that is able to receive. Miska has been studying the Enneagram, an ancient way of describing our unique gifts and seductions. Miska tells me one of my perennial temptations is to be consumed with my inner thoughts, to be so stuffed with my ideas, with myself, that there is no space for others. It is true of my narcissistic self as it is true for all of us: something has to be lost in order for something to be found.

Last week, we walked through Jesus' ascension, that odd moment where Jesus returned to the Father. The way we imagine this story, either with an abracadabra and vanishing poof or with Jesus shooting into the Galilean sky like a Tomahawk missile, it's hard to be anything other than perplexed or embarrassed about the whole event. Jesus' ascension doesn't get much play because for the life of us we can't imagine why it happened. Whatever else, we think it must have been a sad day. Jesus was here, and then he wasn't. A cruel joke to rise from the dead only to disappear again. Of course, this wasn't the disciples reaction at all. After Jesus ascended to the Father, the Scriptures tell us that the disciples returned to town filled with joy, overwhelmed with hope and possibility. 

Jesus told the disciples that it would be good for them if he departed because when he did, the Spirit would come. And the Spirit would be everywhere, in every corner, in every heart. Jesus would have to be absent in one way in order for Jesus to be present in a pervasive and powerful new way. So the disciples gathered to await Pentecost, to await this powerful gift of God's Spirit. They felt the absence, but they eagerly anticipated the new reality God would soon create. 

With the disciples, we know the absence, even as we anticipate new creation. In the Christian year, Pentecost arrives Sunday. But Pentecost also arrives every moment. The invitation of Pentecost is to allow for the absence, for the undoing, for the emptying. And then, receiving the life God brings into that void, cooperate with God by unleashing our energy toward creative life.

Absence then creation is God's tandem maneuver. Creator-God moved into the earth's formless void and, with words that drop life like seeds, spoke our very existence into being. God moved into the dark empty that was Israel's Egypt and, from that barren sand, created a home, a place of belonging. Jesus surrendered to – and then erupted out of – the vast void of death. In other words, if you are in a wasteland, do not despair. Rather, hold on to your hat and your seat because these are exactly the places where God sends the Spirit. And where the Spirit goes, life and creation erupt.

God is, if anything, a creator, sculpting new beauty out of old and discarded fragments. This is why artists have so much to teach us. This is also why all of us are, in some form, artists. 

When you give your people your Spirit, life is created,
and you renew the face of the earth. {Psalm 104.31}

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Telling and Hearing

road to emmausIf someone set out to fabricate Jesus’ Resurrection story, concocting a seditious narrative that would rival Rome’s pagan gods as well as establishment Judaism while catapulting their inner cadre to prominence, the stories they gave us were a piss-poor job.

As rumors of Jesus’ Resurrection spread, there are no brave disciples overturning chariots and marching into the streets. No one says, “See, I told you so.” We don’t have so much as a quiet dinner party with one of the Sons of Thunder popping a bottle of bubbly. Rather, we find disbelieving apostles, frantic disciples sprinting back and forth to the tomb, dumbfounded (though, thankfully, courageous) women and poor Thomas who will never live down that one cynical line, especially since Carvaggio put the image to oil and canvas. Needless to say, the early days of the Resurrection do not offer us a jubilant bunch of Jesus’ followers feeling vindicated and revved to spread the message. They were too busy picking their jaw off the floor.

Two weary, disappointed disciples experienced one of these first Jesus-sightings as they traveled home to Emmaus. Jesus walked up beside them and whether by miracle or grief, we don’t know – but they didn’t recognize their master. When Jesus asked what they were talking about, Cleopas (whose emotions were surely coiled tight) flashed his irritation. “Are you the only one who doesn’t know what’s been going on in Jerusalem?” While it’s likely there were many who paid little attention to this supposed failed prophet’s fate, the irony is that the one receiving the irascible jab was the only one who knew in precise detail exactly what had transpired, all the horror and glory of the preceding hours. To this day, we still ponder what exactly Jesus did in those grey hours, what it means when the Creed announces that Jesus descended into Hades. What loss did Jesus know? What grief? What war did Jesus wage? What love sustained him?

Yet I can’t help but snigger at Jesus’ reply: “What things?” This is Jesus saying, go ahead, tell me about me. Jesus, as is his way, asking a question and opening a conversation.

They did. They told what they knew. A cruel death. Their hopes for a new Israel buried in a hole in rock. We had hoped, they lamented – and those words buckled under the weight of a long, tattered history of tears. Then, an empty tomb. “But no one’s seen Jesus,” they added. The vacant grave was a mystery; but as they saw it, only another cruel blow.

Then Jesus told the broad story, the story as he alone knew it. Jesus unfolded the great drama. Tracing the tale from the writings of Moses and through the writings of the prophets, Jesus sketched what the whole of Scripture had narrated: that One would come from God who, through humility and sacrificial love, would rescue Israel and the world.

The disillusioned disciples needed to tell the things they knew, and these sorrows were excruciating, grievous things to tell. However, even more, they needed Jesus to tell the things he knew because Jesus himself is the story of hope and life.

In our places of rage, fear, desperation, egression or ambivalence, we need to tell what we know, what we’ve experienced, the things that sit heavy on our soul. But even more, we need to hear the story Jesus tells, the story Jesus lives. Our story, left to itself, is not large enough or imaginative enough to envision the full scope. Resurrection happens all around us, but we often need fresh vision to catch sight of it.

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