New Houses from Old Bricks

The treasure hunt never ends

June 20, 2011 · Discernment, Vocation, ministry · 104 comments

This has been my longest blog-silence since I started writing several years ago, but I’ll claim this reason: I’m a grad student once again, this time studying for a Masters degree in Business Administration, with a concentration in Nonprofit Management. It’s not where I thought I’d be at this point in my vocational journey, but after the first two classes, it still seems like a good idea, so I’ll keep forging ahead.

This isn’t the first time my own vocational treasure hunt has taken an unexpected turn. And it’s not the first time the treasure hunt pointed backward at the same time it led forward. Here’s the story, at least the part of it I can see. (The treasure hunt is like an iceberg in that way: One only sees a small part of the story compared to what’s going on under the surface.) Continue reading →

Becoming a better lover

February 10, 2011 · Discernment, Vocation, spiritual life · 106 comments

I spent last weekend on the California coast with a group of college students on a retreat called “Seeking Your Calling, Finding Yourself.” I’ve been leading such retreats for more than seven years now, and while every group is different, it’s interesting to see how certain themes keep surfacing and resurfacing in various retreats. With the group last weekend, I spent a lot of time pondering the possibility of “wrong” choices. Can a choice be “wrong” if you learn something important from it or if something good comes out of it? If not, can you really call anything a “wrong choice”? And if there is no such thing as a wrong choice, why do we bother to seek our calling and practice discernment at all?

I wrote about this in Chapter 4 of my book, but it’s been a while since I talked about it with people. Here’s where the conversation ended up over the weekend: Perhaps there are no “right” or “wrong” choices, only ones which are “more” or “less” loving–toward others and ourselves. Perhaps that is the very best reason to engage in discernment and pay attention to our own clues on the treasure hunts of our lives: so that we can keep practicing love, both giving it and receiving it. We never become perfect at this (something to keep pondering as I prepare a sermon on Matthew 5:48, “Be perfect…”), but we can become more “practiced” and more open-hearted. God loves us no matter what kind of choices we make, but becoming able to give and receive more love makes a big difference in our life, relationships, and work.

As we practice discernment, we gain trust in God, ourselves, and the journey itself–which helps us to love better, as fear loses its grip on us. And as we gain freedom from self-centered anxiety, we become more free for love. We “love” in all kinds of ways–this isn’t just true of romantic love or love shown to family, friends, and strangers. It’s also about the love we practice in our work, learning, faith and worship, and the ways we inhabit our communities and planet.

So with the weekend’s retreat in mind, with Valentine’s Day approaching, and with today being the ninth anniversary of my ordination to pastoral ministry, I’m recalling this hope: “Hope that with the skills we learn on our search for treasure, we will one day love God, the world, and ourselves as passionately as we are loved” (The Treasure Hunt of Your Life, p.158). May it be so.

(Photo by gigaman, flickr/creativecommons)

Hello! You’re welcome to belong

February 2, 2011 · Community, Discernment, ministry, spiritual life · 54 comments

Many things related to “welcome” are crossing my path these days. With last Sunday celebrated as “Welcome Sunday” by many in the Reconciling in Christ community and this recent thought-provoking blog post by Pastor Keith Anderson, I have been pondering what it takes for someone to feel “welcome”–in particular, welcome in a church community or at a worship service.

Much of the church talk about welcome and hospitality that I’ve seen over the years focuses on first impressions–what happens the first time someone comes to worship, for example, and how follow-up happens from there. First impressions are crucial, I agree, but that seems more like “greeting”–and “greeting” may or may not deepen into “welcome,” and “welcome” may or may not become “belonging.”

Perhaps these are false distinctions. Perhaps they happen simultaneously, or perhaps they happen in a different order for some people. Perhaps neither greeting nor welcome works very well if there’s no potential for a deeper belonging down the road. In fact, perhaps it’s the potential for belonging that defines a good greeting or welcome.

But then how does belonging happen, and more to the point, how quickly does it happen? Continue reading →

Whose story is this, anyway?

January 4, 2011 · Bible, Discernment, ministry, spiritual life · 150 comments

As I’m preparing the sermon for this Sunday’s celebration of The Baptism of Our Lord, this line jumped out at me in a commentary on the gospel, Matthew 3:13-17:

“The writer of Matthew strives to link the story of Jesus’ life with the story of God’s people as told in the Hebrew Scriptures.”

It is often noted about Matthew that, of the four gospel writers, he is the one who quotes Hebrew Scripture most frequently, and perhaps that is why his gospel was placed first in the New Testament, as a bridge from the Old to the New. But that’s not why this line jumped out at me.

I think it was because, as a reader of Scripture, I am always looking for something similar: the link between my life and the story of Jesus and God’s people as told in the Christian and Hebrew Scriptures. And, as a preacher of Scripture, I’m always looking for ways to help others find those links too. That’s not often easy, and sometimes it can seem almost impossible. But I keep looking, because the effort is always worth it.

With the story of Jesus’ baptism, the easy way to link our story with his is to focus on what happens last: God says of Jesus, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:17). Then the preacher points out how God says the same thing of us at our baptisms: we are God’s beloved sons and daughters. Voila! Stories linked.

But that seems too easy. It ignores several major differences between Jesus’ story and ours. For one thing, Matthew’s point here is not about God’s love per se. It’s that Jesus is actually Son of God, in a way that the rest of us are not.

More concretely, in today’s churches (at least, in Lutheran churches), we don’t experience baptisms like Jesus’ baptism. The landscape is different, obviously. And for us, the heavens usually do not open. The Spirit does not descend like a dove and alight on the one baptized. We do not hear the voice from heaven.

So, as I keep looking for a new way to think about the link between our own lives and this story, I wonder if I might look here: The same God who was present at Jesus’ baptism is also present at baptisms today. Perhaps we get so focused on looking for the concrete links (i.e. Jesus was baptized by immersion in a river, so we should baptize by immersion in a river) that we miss the bigger picture: the God who was present then is also present now, doing the same kinds of things that God always does.

The work of interpretation, then, becomes the work of paying attention to the ways God is acting today: in this case, sending the Spirit and revealing Jesus to the world again and again. With this story and many others, that work is always worth it.

Don’t speak, just wait

December 6, 2010 · Bible, Discernment, ministry, spiritual life · (No comments)

If a pastor is going to get laryngitis, she might as well get it during the Advent season. At least there’s Biblical precedent for this combination of speechlessness and waiting in the very first story of Luke’s gospel: the story of Zechariah, father-to-be of John the Baptist (Luke 1:5-24). When an angel tells him that his barren wife, Elizabeth, will bear a child, he’s doubtful; who wouldn’t be? But the angel Gabriel is not impressed by the extent of his doubts, and those doubts have consequences: “But now, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you will become mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur” (Lk.1:20). And so Zechariah spends his time waiting for the birth, speechless.

I used to think the speechlessness was a punishment, along the lines of “if you can’t say anything nice (or faithful, or theologically appropriate, or whatever), then don’t say anything at all.” But today, as I face my own temporary time of not-speaking, I wonder if there is also grace in this consequence. When you can’t speak, you can listen better. You have time and space to wrestle with your own private doubts–of which Zechariah had plenty–without speaking them into public reality along the way. You can enter into the silence of waiting in a more concrete way. Which, after all, is what Advent is all about.

In my line of work, you can’t get as much accomplished when you can’t speak, and perhaps this too is what Advent is all about–not the busy-ness of Christmas preparations, but the slow darkness of the winter solstice and, eventually, the hopeful lengthening of days when the Christ child’s birth will be celebrated, when the “new thing” will be born.

Recently I’ve been watching and listening to Brian McLaren’s song “To Be Born.” Words such as “do not push or rush, do not fight or strive” seem to go well with speechlessness. Just let it be. Let the new thing be born. Do not try to determine its identity or its timing or its purpose with so many words. Welcome it with openness. Welcome it with humility. Welcome it with silence.

There will be plenty of time for speech, as Zechariah discovered (Luke 1:57-80). For now, we wait.

Photo by Anders Printz (flickr/Creative Commons).

Coveting my neighbor’s talents

August 8, 2010 · Bible, Community, Discernment, Vocation, ministry, spiritual life · (No comments)

I just returned from the Invitation to Service event, where I experienced yet again a reason I need to keep talking about finding one’s calling: because I forget key principles myself if I go too long between telling others about them.

For example: One of the principles of calling (”vocation”) is that you start with the gifts and talents you get, which are not always the ones you want. I’ve spent much of my life and ministry mourning the gifts I didn’t have or wanted more of, which diminishes the gifts I do have. This makes it hard to follow wherever my calling is taking me because I’m always wanting to go somewhere else. (It reminds me of Parker Palmer’s line from Let Your Life Speak: “Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.”) I was hoping that I’d be immune to this by now, but I needed another booster shot this weekend. Continue reading →

Watch for falling bricks

July 13, 2010 · Discernment, ministry, spiritual life · (No comments)

Every now and then I encounter someone whose play with the metaphor of “new houses from old bricks” reveals new insights about how identity and faith are formed. I had such a conversation yesterday with a young woman from my congregation who’s about to start her second year of college.

We were talking about the way each person picks up “bricks” along life’s journey–bits and pieces of insight, tradition, and experience. Those bricks can then be used in the creation of a self, a faith, and a life big enough and strong enough to live in: a “new house.” This is a risky process for a couple reasons:

If you never pick up any bricks (that is, appropriate tradition and experience, claiming them as yours), you’ll be at best a “renter” in your own life and communities, always depending on others to provide your shelter (tell you what to believe in).
If you know how to pick up bricks (accumulate experiences and ideas) but don’t know how to build with them (interpret, create, and do theology for yourself), you’ll end up with a pile of bricks–not something that will provide shelter in life’s storms.

Yesterday my friend came up with a third risk that I’m still pondering. Sometimes, she said, you pick up a brick and then, instead of it getting incorporated in the structure, it becomes an obstacle. I can picture a building project in process, with the leftover bricks scattered throughout the yard just waiting to trip up the inattentive. Or, she said, you might drop the brick on your foot. Continue reading →

Adam Sandler meets Barbara Brown Taylor

June 22, 2010 · Discernment, spiritual life · 1 comment

Lately I haven’t been writing as much as I’d like, but I have been doing lots of reading and watching. Most of it is pretty random, which makes for some interesting combinations. For example: Recently I watched Click, the 2006 film in which Adam Sandler’s character, Michael Newman, is blessed/cursed with a universal remote that controls his experience of his life. With this powerful gadget, he can pause, rewind, fast forward, and go to particular scenes as he chooses. If you haven’t seen it, you can probably imagine the plot: all is fine until the device which supposedly gives him control, starts controlling him.

I encountered this movie in the midst of reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s An Altar in the World. With this book in mind, I saw in the film an interesting image of habits–in particular, the way habits shape our experience of life. Continue reading →

Getting it all figured out (or not)

June 15, 2010 · Discernment, Vocation, spiritual life · (No comments)

I have a love-hate relationship with deadlines. Love the way they force me to complete projects; hate the stress they create. Overall, I’m pretty good with project deadlines. But I have a terrible track record with life deadlines: the ones that begin, “By the time I’m _____ years old, I will have….”

I have a birthday coming up this week and my twenty-year high school reunion coming up next month, so I’m considering such deadlines, and the biggies that I have failed to meet. For example, I have not moved away from the West Coast, pursued further graduate education, or had children. In my earlier years, the years in which people frequently ask “where do you hope to be in ten or twenty years,” I had imagined “completing” all those things by this point. (Instead, I moved back to the West Coast, found myself immersed in the joys and challenges of campus and congregational ministry, and got divorced.)

I also would have imagined having some things figured out by now: how to balance my personal and professional lives, for example, and how to savor the world as it is and work to improve it at the same time (as E.B. White said).

Fortunately, as hard as it seems to remember this, imposing deadlines on myself couldn’t be further from the point. Continue reading →

Resurrection faith: trust + openness

March 30, 2010 · Bible, Discernment, Vocation, ministry, spiritual life · (No comments)

As I circle around an Easter sermon for Sunday, the mixture of familiar and surprising, old and new, is fascinating me about the resurrection story this year.

Each of the four gospels has a unique way of telling the Easter story of Jesus rising from the dead. This year is Luke’s turn to tell the story, and I was struck by his emphasis on “remembering.” Isn’t the whole point of resurrection that we don’t have to remember the horrific events that came before it–Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion and humiliation? And yet the “two men in dazzling clothes” at the empty tomb say this to the women who had come to finish their embalming work on Jesus’ body: ” ‘Remember how (Jesus) told you…that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.’ Then they remembered his words…” (Luke 24:6-7).

Whatever is happening now on this first day of the week, it has continuity with what has come before–with Jesus’ words. The empty tomb signals that something has changed, but some things have remained true and trustworthy: God’s promises and will to save and make whole. The love and friendship of Jesus. The call to follow him and serve one’s neighbor.

I had started preparing a sermon about this continuity, with the help of a commentary I read which calls resurrection “the vindication of Jesus’ preaching and the validation of his ministry.” In others words, what was true before the resurrection is still true now. But then I noticed a totally different sermon getting woven through it. This was a sermon about discontinuity. Continue reading →

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