Spiritual Poverty

This morning I came across a very interesting thought from Thomas Merton:

The life of Christ in the soul of the priest depends in large measure on the priest's attitude toward the "needy and the poor"- the materially poor, if he deals with them, or at heart, the spiritually underprivileged in the community where all are supposed to be materially poor together. ~December 12, 1952 (Journals, vol. 3, p. 7)

In my own ministry context I deal a lot with those that are materially poor, and most if the time it's fairly easy to have compassion and see how we're doing God's work by helping to meet their needs and hopefully empower them to come to a more stable place in their own lives.

I say "most of the time" because my compassion reserves are sometimes low on days when we get more requests for help than we have the resources to provide, or when I encounter people who are dishonest.

What I have a harder time with is seeing how we do the work of God amongst those who are "spiritually underprivileged", but aren't materially needy. I grew up in a very affluent community where people are actually cursed by their abundance. It's very easy to get angry at people's sense of entitlement and their materialistic outlook on life, especially at this time of year. My knee-jerk reaction is usually to think "yeah, you're the goat that's going to get the raw end of the deal one day".

But if Father Thomas is correct, and I believe he is, then the life of Christ is much more real inside of me if I am able to see those attitudes and behaviors as a sign of spiritual poverty. Even tougher than that is confronting my own spiritual poverty- I still live in Brentwood, after all, and even if I may not act on it as much as some of my neighbors, I covet things just as much as they do.

The challenge for me as a pastor, and for any Christian living in a consumer society, is to move past righteous indignation and speak loving truth to the spiritual poverty around us and in ourselves.

Reflections on the Eve of Ordination

On Monday night I will be ordained as an Elder in Full Connection in the Tennessee Conference of the United Methodist Church.

And now I'm seriously considering the idea that I might be the pastor of a church for my whole career.

I know that sounds like a strange thing to say, especially since the ordination process in the United Methodist Church is one of the longest and most convoluted things ever created by humankind. I began the candidacy process in 2000, while I was in college, and I've been "in ministry" (that is, drawing a paycheck from a church) since I was eighteen years old.

It's not that I never wanted to be the pastor of a church. It's just that for a number of years I thought that my own path in ministry would take a somewhat different form. Since sometime around my senior year in college, when I was writing my honors thesis and getting a taste of in depth academic research and informally TA-ing a 100 level religion class with my advisor, I thought that I wanted to get a PhD and teach in a college or seminary.

That is how I thought for a number of years that I would be of greatest service to the church, particularly since I became a preaching and liturgy nerd in seminary.

But then two things happened. One was more gradual, and the other was fairly sudden.

The gradual realization was that doing a PhD is a long, expensive, frustrating process with a very high drop-out rate and very few tenure-track positions available. And from observing the chatter around theological education, there may be some huge shifts on the horizon that might make traditional seminary professor positions even more rare.

Pursuing a PhD would also require some big sacrifices that I'm not prepared to ask my wife and daughters to make, since they already sacrifice so much to support my vocation as a pastor.

The more sudden thing was that I found myself serving a church where I could actually see myself serving for a long time.

In saying that I mean no disrespect to the congregations I have previously served. In each of these places I had meaningful experiences and learned valuable lessons, to say nothing of a whole lot about who I am. It's just that I've never been in a place where I could see myself serving in that capacity for a long time.

But now I'm at Arlington- the place where my journey of faith began with my parents making promises on my behalf at my baptism- promises which they kept in every way. I've only been there a year, and there are lots of challenges, but there is a great chemistry with this congregation that makes me believe that this could be a place where my own gifts and graces can effectively serve the church, and, more importantly, the Kingdom of God.

For most of my life I've always been oriented towards the next thing. Graduating from high school, then college, getting married, graduating from seminary, having my own church, starting a family, and now getting ordained . That mindset made me think that I'd continue on for another degree, position, or whatever, but what if I have to shift my thinking and actually invest myself in where I am right now?

So, for probably the first time in my life, I'm OK with not knowing what the "next step" is. And it feels strangely good.

If you're in the Nashville area, I'd love for you to attend the ordination service at Annual Conference.

Acts of Charity

(Note- I'm using Lent and Easter Wisdom from Thomas Merton as my Lenten devotional this year. I'll be blogging the journaling prompts most days.)

The call to "do penance" is based not on the fact that penance will keep us in trim, but on the fact that "the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand". ~Seasons of Celebration, p. 130

What was your last act of "charity"? Why did you do it?

Why, that's easy, my last act of charity was, uh... hang on a second...

To quote Rick Perry, "oops"

After a minute or two of thinking I remembered that last week I was helping fill bags at Arlington's food pantry because there were several people there all at once, and our one volunteer was looking a bit overwhelmed. I sat there talking with one guy for a few minutes, hearing about his struggles, and we said a quick prayer together.

OK, not a bad act of charity, but why was I blanking for a couple minutes? It's not because I'm such a charitable guy that I just can't keep track of all the works of mercy I do, and it's certainly not because I'm so humble that I don't keep count.

I talk a good game and challenge people to make acts of mercy part of their discipleship, but when that question gets turned on me, I stumble for a few moments.

My blanking in answering that question reminds me that I'm often so busy being a pastor, I forget to be a disciple of Jesus. I'm very fortunate that my call is also my vocation, and I spend my time helping others grow in their discipleship, which I guess you could interpret as acts of charity.

Remember how I said a "quick prayer" with that guy? It was quick because I had a massive "to do" list sitting on my desk.

The unfortunate truth is that I've fallen into the trap of busyness. I'm working very hard on getting The Road up and running, preparing for my ordination interviews, plus all the normal pastoral duties I do, and I've unfortunately been neglecting my own discipleship, even though the reason I'm a pastor in the first place is because I felt a profound call at a fairly young age to devote my whole life to being a disciple of Jesus.

Lest I beat myself up too much (which, as Father Merton points out, is not the purpose of Lent), I have been fairly faithful to works of piety, but as Mr. Wesley emphasized, acts of mercy as just as essential. When the two get out of balance, our priorities and perspectives get out of whack. Say, for example, spending too much time on the nuts and bolts work of ministry while having a hard time remembering what my own last act of charity was.

Unfinished Business?

As I have less than a month to go before my last Sunday with Bethlehem, I've been reflecting back on the last four years, what I've learned, what I've done well, the many things I've done wrong, etc. I've especially thought a lot about the previous two years and everything that has happened since the fire.

One of the questions I've gotten from more than a few people is why I'm leaving now. Specifically, they wonder why I "don't want to see it (the building project) through" or if I'm leaving things "unfinished".

Honestly, I asked those questions for several months as the sense that I needed to move on began to grow. Would walking away now make two years worth of hard work all be for nothing? Would moving on now be saying that I couldn't handle a difficult situation? What would this mean for my legacy at Bethlehem?

Pondering these questions made me realize that my main motivation for staying would be for the sake of my own ego, for the opportunity to be the guy standing front and center on the day we dedicate the new building. One member of my congregation told me that I "deserve to preach the first sermon in the new sanctuary". Whether that's true is for other people to decide, and reasons of ego are a bad reason to do anything, especially to stay too long in a pastoral role.

I blogged about my rationale for leaving a while back, and those reasons are the final result of a lot of reflection and prayer. One of the things that has kept coming to me over and over as I've pondered my future is how Paul corrects the people in the church at Corinth (1 Corinthians 3) when they're arguing about who they "belong to" and use that to argue that one person is better than another. Paul reminds them that he, Apollos, and any other person are just laborers, that God is the one who makes everything happens, and that only God is worthy of the glory afforded by saying someone "belongs to" them.

I came to realize (with the help of some wise friends) that my desire to be front and center the day we dedicate the new building, to have my name on the plaque saying who built the building, was a desire for the glory and credit that belong to God and not to me or anyone else. I also came to realize that the day the congregation dedicates the new building will not be the day they arrive at some perfect status. There will always be more work to do, just as there was much work done before I ever got there. Thinking that my leadership is somehow crucial is pretty darn arrogant. There is always "unfinished business" at the end of every pastorate- it's just a little more obvious in this case.

In any case, we did come to a natural point of completion. The ground-breaking on Palm Sunday symbolized the end of the fire chapter of the church's life, with all the hard work of grieving (although the grieving has not ended for some), recovering, visioning, and planning for the future. We even set up the space for the ceremony to resemble the first worship following the fire. Now that the ground is broken, the congregation can focus on nesting in the new building and what that will mean for their future, and that chapter of their lives will be overseen by a new pastor.

I look forward to witnessing the fruits of our labor together from afar, knowing that no matter what person gets the credit in the eyes of some people, it's God who has made it all happen.