soulwerker

As I was preparing for tomorrow’s sermon and reading (yet again) the story of the Resurrected Jesus appearing to the two disciples on the Emmaus road on the first Easter, I kept returning to the idea that the Risen Lord spends the bulk of his time with them “opening the scriptures” — showing them the ways in which those texts (what we would now call the “Hebrew Scriptures” or “Old Testament”) made plain the ways in which Messiah would have to suffer and die. In fact, after Jesus was “made known” to these two followers “in the breaking of the bread”, they asked each other, “Did not our hearts burn within us as he opened the scriptures?”

The more I read that story, the more I became convinced that my own engagement with the Scriptures has lately been more utilitarian than devotional. Certainly, I have read the passages appointed in the Daily Office Lectionary. Of course, I read the passages assigned for the coming Sunday. But what I’ve been lacking is an ongoing saturation in the story of the Scriptures — sometimes I speak the language of organizational development with more fluency that the language of the Bible. In fact, I found myself thinking, “Isn’t marinating in these texts my first and foremost job?” After all, what good is a teacher who doesn’t avail himself to the opportunity to learn? Beyond that, how do I plan to practice the cure of souls when my own soul isn’t regularly nurtured from the stream of stories we call the Bible?

As I thought about it, I figured it had been years since I had simply read the Bible cover to cover (a regular practice in my previous denomination). In fact, I haven’t intentionally engaged in this undertaking since I’ve become an Episcopalian. So…no time like the present!

I posted an invitation to read the Bible “in course” — from one end to the other, including the Deutero-Canonicals (often called the Apocrypha) on my Facebook page a few days ago. I have a few takers. We’re going to do this task in 120 days and we’re beginning on Monday, May 9. We’re inviting anyone who would like to participate to join us. This isn’t a study per se, though we may discover we want to do that. I may post some of the things I think about as I do this reading, but I’ll be working more from a reflective than instructive stance. I’ll be reading from the New Revised Standard Version, but if you want to play, any version you have on hand will do. Here’s the first week’s worth of reading. I’ll hope to post the full schedule later this week. I hope you can join us! Happy reading!

May 9: Genesis 1-9
May 10: Genesis 10-19
May 11: Genesis 20-26
May 12: Genesis 27-34
May 13: Genesis 35-42
May 14: Genesis 43-50

I spent much of the day reading various “sermon resource” websites as I continued to reflect upon the lessons assigned for this week and the circumstances which will still be swirling about when it’s time for me to preach in less than two days. Frankly, I was looking for some help, but none was forthcoming from cyberspace for me. Apparently many of the resource pages were written well before last Sunday night. Most of them probably offered interesting exegetical commentary, but I couldn’t get interested. Maybe this is a function of being an overtly “heart” person. I’m too conflicted to plow ahead and build a sermon that doesn’t speak to the confusion I’m left with after a week of confusing news. And as much as I love my mother, I’m not convinced that what people will want on Sunday morning is a healthy dose of Hallmark sentimentality. I did read one preacher’s blog who touted his pride about not bringing “political” issues into the pulpit. I couldn’t help but think, “How do we leave people’s lives out of the pulpit?”

I suspect tomorrow will be a very long day. Sunday’s coming. A terrorist is dead. We are still at war. Offering a sweet sermon on Sunday about a mystical and mysterious Jesus who floats, untouchable, above the grime of human failure seems like the ultimate exercise in gnosticism. And so, while I don’t know what I will say just yet, I’m prepared that I will say something. In anticipation of that event (and in response to the anonymous letter quoted in yesterday’s post), I have included a note to parishioners in the Sunday bulletin about the sermon. This is something I’ve never done, but this seemed like a necessary thing. It is reprinted below:

Greetings all!

This is an unusual circumstance. I don’t usually include “liner notes” about the Sunday sermon as a part of the bulletin, but this has been a difficult sermon to prepare and a difficult week in which to prepare it. In fact, I’m writing this note to you all on Thursday afternoon, when the sermon is still very much “under construction”.

Sermons are all contextual. They arise out of the preacher’s prayer life, the common prayer life of the parish she/he serves, the study of the sacred texts of Scripture and conversations about those scriptures with others. But all of this praying and studying and talking happens in the midst of life as it is lived. We cannot come behind the walls of the worship space and seek to shut out the challenges, ambiguities and evils that exist out in the so-called “real world”. Even if the preacher tries to pretend that what’s in the news doesn’t impact the people in the pews, everyone can still see the elephant in the room, no matter how hard we try to ignore its presence.

Through the years, you’ve been a gracious group of preaching partners (because without a congregation gathered there is no sermon). You’ve patiently listened as I have sought to find my voice as your rector. Sometimes we have disagreed on how to interpret a passage of scripture or how to respond to difficult issues in the broader culture. This is a part of communal life and I am grateful for the ways we have engaged each other when there were those moments of disagreement. As I reflected over my preaching here, I know you’ve listened to me talk about the wars in Iraq/Afghanistan and the human tragedy present in natural disasters (Hurricane Katrina, the Southeast Asia Tsunami, the Haiti Eartquake and recently the situation in Japan). You have listened as I have challenged us all concerning our call to serve the poor who live within just a few miles of our red doors. You heard the raw emotion of a heart broken after the shootings in Tucson. You remained patiently engaged with me as I offered what I hope were Gospel-based sermons on two occasions during the recent protests in Madison. We’ve been through lots together homiletically!

And so, I was taken aback earlier this week when I received a letter from an anonymous author that seemed to indicate I would not engage in a conversation concerning the U.S. action in Pakistan a few days ago which led to the death of Osama Bin Laden. Because the letter was anonymous, I’m not certain if it was even written by a parishioner. But I have become convinced through the years that we preachers are called to offer to our parishioners our best effort at how Christians are to make sense of such events both in light of the Gospel and as a community of people who purport to follow in the way of Jesus. Today’s sermon will not be about Osama Bin Laden, though the events of this week will likely be referenced. The sermon will seek to be a reflection on the lessons we will hear together in the liturgy. The sermon will attempt to tease out how our faith calls us to live toward Resurrection even in a world that continues to appear to be enslaved to the twin powers of Sin and Death.

Given the events of the last ten days, I’ve been doing lots of thinking about the work of the sermon within the context of the liturgy. Back in seminary, I was taught that, because our worship as Episcopalians is centered in the Eucharist, the sermon’s major function is to “break open” the words of the Scriptures the community has heard as a means of leading us towards the breaking of the bread at the Holy Table. In this view of liturgy, the preached Word has a somewhat different function than say, in a typically Protestant denomination in which the sermon is the key component of the worship experience. As one professor offhandedly said to me at lunch in the seminary cafeteria one day, “If people want to stand up and cheer after one of your sermons, you’ve made the preaching event about you and not about God. The place people should feel the need to cheer is upon the invitation to receive Eucharist.”

Now, nearly nine years into the vocation of pastor/priest/preacher, I’m not so sure about my professor’s certainty. To be sure, as a preacher within a “lectionary Church” means I don’t get to pick the passages I want to explore on any given Sunday — they are chosen for me by the framers of the Revised Common Lectionary. My choice is to remain under that discipline, even when it’s not completely obvious to me how any of the passages offered by the lectionary actually speak to whatever might be going on in the world around us. And while I don’t aim for a cheer after a sermon, I continue to hope a vague memory of the words lobbed in the direction of parishioners’ ears lasts at least until Sunday dinner.

I am fully aware that clergy types are the ones charged by their ordination vows to study the Scriptures alongside of and on behalf of their particular congregations. A part of our job is to remind the folks who gather from Sunday to Sunday of how the narrative of Jesus is separate and distinct from our narrative as “Americans” or “good people”. Sometimes the narrative of Jesus is hidden from us for the other six days of the week. We get so busy living our lives we forget the sort of life we who call ourselves Christians are called to live. In a culture that worships individuality, we Christians stand in need of constant reminding that we are a “people” and that our faith is not so much an uber-private collection of our innermost thoughts, but is the rich deposit of the thoughts, prayers, hopes, dreams and failures of those who have walked the way of Jesus before us.

The temptation for a preacher in any given week is to take the free ride — offer a bit of a devotional talk, peppered with pithy pious platitudes and geared toward the individual becoming “better” (maybe a bit nicer, a little more thoughtful, saying the right prayers, or reading a snippet of religious literature here or there). After all, in a culture that has a do-it-yourself attitude toward “spirituality”, what could be better?

Offer the three point plan on being a better spouse, parent, neighbor or friend. Share five steps to overcoming this or that middle class malady (anxiety, depression, anger, etc.). Tell a nice story with a good moral. Help people feel good about feeling religious. Keep spirituality in its “place” — hidden from view in the deepest recesses of our souls.

God forbid that anyone would know our spirituality (and our religion) actually impacts the way we live the rest of our lives! And woe be unto any preacher of the Episcopal variety who dares flirt with the notion that the Gospel might actually challenge the notion that the god in whom Americans purport to “trust” and the god upon whom Americans call to “bless” our nation is NOT the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Jesus, Paul, Polycarp, Iraneaus, Boniface, Calvin, Barth, Bonhoeffer or Romero. On a practical note, exactly what do we hope to accomplish in a sermon confined by the constraints of time and people’s ever-shrinking attention span? Truthfully, exactly how much of any sort of thoughtful response toward anything can be offered in the 10-12 minutes the average congregation is prepared to sit through as “sermon time”? This time limitation isn’t the fault of a preacher’s listeners…it’s the natural outgrowth of all that we are attempting to accomplish within the parameters of the liturgy.

So, this Sunday, I will stand in the midst of slightly less than two hundred souls and dare to utter something toward proclaiming a “word of the Lord”. I will do so with a set of texts given to me by the people of God throughout the ages and assigned to be read on this particular day. I will stand there and look out at a people who have, in the past week, been witnesses to destruction in the American South wrought by horrific storms. They have also been witnesses to the media storm in the aftermath of an American military action that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden. With the swiftness of communication and the immediacy of “news”, it’s easy to forget that just over a year ago we were watching the oil slick spread over the Gulf of Mexico and that a nuclear disaster continues to unfold in the aftermath of the indescribable devastation wrought by the earthquake/tsunami in Japan just a few short weeks ago. Here in Wisconsin, the days of protesting crowds filling the state Capitol Building have morphed into the tedium of watching the results of the legislation passed in the midst of those protests — as the impact upon people from all walks of life becomes more and more visible (1,000 positions cut from Milwaukee Pubic School system being one tiny example). Perhaps the reason so many preachers opt to take their homilies in the direction of personal piety is because there’s so little we can actually do to impact any of this. Perhaps the other reason is we know the risk we take in attempting to speak toward any of it is to lose the confidence of the pledge-paying parishioners who fund our salaries. Or maybe, just maybe we are speechless ourselves…and yet our vocation pushes us to speak.

So here I go again…off to work on a sermon. Uncertain of what I will say. And more and more uncertain that twelve minutes is enough time to say much of anything meaningful.

This past Thursday, I had the privilege of sharing a lunchtime meal with a retired pastor. We chatted about books, about liturgy, about “church growth” and “Generation X”. We wondered about the state of theological formation for would-be ordinands. We compared notes on the state of our respective denominations (Episcopal Church for me and Presbyterian Church, USA for him). All of this chat comprises the usual “side dishes” of a clergy luncheon.

What made the lunch so remarkable, though was the way in which this quiet, understated, former pastor spoke of his years in ministry. He talked about the joy he derived from sitting in parishioners’ dining rooms, looking at photo albums, sipping tea and listening to their stories. He reminisced about the “tender moments” of the pastoral life — births, baptisms, confirmations, weddings, celebrations, difficulties of all sorts, illnesses, deaths and funerals — those times when pastors are invited into the very hearts and lives of the people we serve.

My friend joked about his “naturally serious” way of being and gave thanks that, through the years, he had learned (with the help of the Lord and Garrison Keillor) to lighten up a bit. He didn’t fill me up with “war stories” — of church conflict, resistance to change, irritable personalities and petty power struggles — the sorts of things we more recently ordained folks seem to endlessly discuss with one another. He offered me a double helping of the joys to be found in knowing the names of babies and taking one’s time in the world when time seems so scarce. I couldn’t help but think to myself that I probably needed to lighten up a bit (and I don’t need to listen to Keillor, I can have lunch with Howard!).

Decades of service to the Church in the local setting of “church” and then one’s “active” ministry is ended. The Church goes on…as does the “churches” one served. All of the issues that seemed to matter so much in the day to day drama of congregational life fade away. A new generation of clergy-types takes up the challenge. The times change. The technology changes. But day to day congregational life remains remarkably the same — as groups of would be disciples practice living the teachings of the Lord we say we follow with one another in the rickety and raucous world of parochial relationships.

I think I got an insight into what “the cure of souls” might actually look like when its lived out with generosity of spirit, an attitude of humility and a solid sense of one’s own gifts and “growing edges”. Such a pastoral life is remarkable in its lack of self-induced drama. Perhaps what Howard taught me most in our hour and a half together is the day to day journey of this wonderfully strange vocation is much more important than whatever aspirations one might have for “the parish” (which might be nothing more than a cheap veneer of vanity and career aspirations anyway) pale in comparison with the opportunities to grow in relationship with fellow followers of Jesus, and by extension, to grow in relationship with God.

Someone once told me that the most maddening thing about the clergy life is the stuff we do when we’re working doesn’t look much like work. Here’s what I learned at lunch on Thursday: the work that doesn’t look much like work is the real and important work. And while I suspect he would demur about our lunch being a “teaching moment”, I would say Howard filled me up with plenty of lessons from a life lived and a Lord served.

A bit over three years ago, I began a blogging experiment as a part of my work in parish ministry. Lacking much imagination, I named my blog “Tosa Rector”. Lacking much technical skill, I simply started blathering away (would be preachers are good at that!). The blog wasn’t very visually appealing — words, words and more words. Entries were erratic at best and sometimes I’d forget to write anything for months on end. Quality was, (how shall I say it?) “uneven”.

Then, between January 8 and April 20 of this year, I made it a point to publish something every day. Again, the quality was uneven, but I found that every now and then, I actually managed to say something reasonably coherent. Writing became fun for the first time in years.

Then, I found myself frustrated with the platform I was using. Every time I would think of adding some new thing or another, I would find there was no (at least for me) simple way to do it within the platform. I also became increasingly uneasy with having my “online” identity so tied to my role as the rector of an Episcopal Church. Certainly, serving as the pastor of Trinity Church in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin is a part of who I am, but the work I do in the parish isn’t the sum total of “me”.

So, here we go again. People who have used this particular platform continually tell me how flexible and “user friendly” it is. This is one user who definitely needs “friendly” when it comes to the blogosphere! The site will be morphing in the coming days…be patient with me as I learn the “ins and outs” of becoming a WordPress person — and as I attempt to grow my writing style as well.

Here goes nothing and (hopefully) something.