Vocation

I have been thinking a lot lately about a pastor friend of ours.  He died early this year, after a battle with brain cancer.

He worked with my husband as the Executive Pastor of a large church in suburban Twin Cities.  He was the pastor who worked most, and appreciated most, the contemporary worship service.  Mostly I knew John because I often came to worship on Monday evenings.  It was a small, informal service, a great contrast from all of the other services at this church.

Once I suggested that he take prayer concerns on Monday evenings.  As long as he had a small service with a very different DNA from all of the others, why not make use of that distinctiveness?  Of course, he took my suggestion, and tried it a few times.

After leaving my husband's church, John went on to become the Lead Pastor at one of the largest congregations in the Twin Cities.  After that, he became the Senior Pastor at (I believe) the largest Lutheran church in the United States.

John didn't fit my stereotype of what a Senior Pastors of a large congregation looked like.  First of all, he was humble.  Second, he admitted to being dyslexic.  Also, he wore his piety on his sleeve.  I don't know why it is that I thought a senior pastor of a large congregation wouldn't have these qualities, but there you go.  He was also interested in leadership:  both pastoral and lay.  He was a leader who invested in empowering other leaders.

A year after he began his last pastorate, he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor.  It was just about the time I was getting ready to leave Minnesota and journey down to Texas.  I got on his Caring Bridge site and read about his progress.

I've kept track of people on Caring Bridge before, but John's updates were unlike any others.  Updates on his progress were slight.  What he shared, day after day, was encouragement.  From his hospital bed, from where-ever he was, when he couldn't speak or preach, he shared his faith and encouragement with everyone who read his words.  He shared the importance of joy.  He shared his conviction that all of our lives make a difference.  He shares his love of God, and God's grace.

John did some impressive things in his years in ministry.  Because of his passion for the least and the lost, he was instrumental in developing both local and global outreach ministries.  He wanted to make the world more like the Kingdom Jesus envisioned.  But in the last years of his life, when he couldn't do the impressive things any longer,  I saw so clearly the spiritual foundation of his ministry, his call.

It was Grace.  He had this profound experience of God's grace, the love of God given freely to him.  It broke his heart to know how many people did not believe that God loved them, did not believe they were worthy of God's love.  He wanted everyone to experience that.

And he wanted to build bridges, not walls.  Underneath all of the ministries and foundations, what he wanted was to reflect the love of God in Christ, and that this love was for ALL people.  So he loved people who disagreed with him, and disagreed with him passionately, and he showed that.  And he said, you  might consider him naive and a Pollyanna, but he had been called the worst of names because he dared to reflect Christ's love, and build bridges.

It is not often that we get to see someone's calling, distilled to its most basic form, and then reflected so clearly.  But that is what I give thanks for in the life of my friend John.  I give thanks for his clear reflection of the grace of God, which is love.  

I give thanks for John.  And for the love of Christ, which filled him, and fills him still.

A colleague at his last church said of him, "He taught us how to live, and he taught us how to die."

Whatever else you say, this is what it means to be a leader.

And today, and at such a time as this, when divisions and hatred are so high, somehow, his calling, and his life, give me hope.

Child Of God

In my sermon this morning I told a story (it happens to be a true story) about a family I knew growing up.  They were friends of ours from church, really good friends of my parents, maybe almost their best friends, actually.  I didn't say that, though.  The family had two children, a daughter and a son, both adopted.  They were younger than I was, and I got to babysit them on occasion.  Okay, I think I babysat them a lot.  I babysat them so much that I really got to know some of the books that I read to them at bedtime.

There were a couple of books about adoption, and one line that I remember to this day, that explained adoption:  "You are really special because we chose you for our daughter or son."  Maybe I remember it because I was, at twelve years old, already sort of a proto-theologian.  I read that book, and that line, many times.

As their daughter grew up, she became troubled.  She rebelled fiercely.  She experimented with drugs and alcohol.  She went with a rough crowd.  She ran away more than once. She ended up in jail a couple of times.  For the longest time her parents didn't know what to do, and all at once it came out:  She never bought the line from the book on adoption:  "You are really special because we chose you for our daughter."  Instead, what she had been thinking was:  "My real mother didn't want me.  My real mother gave me away.  I must be worthless."  And the voices of those thoughts drowned out the voice of love and belonging given to her.

I told this story because I wanted us to consider that our basic identity is child of God, but it's so easy to believe and even seek other things for ourselves.  The popular one, the successful one, the failure, the one who dies with the most toys, the one who works the hardest.

Child of God.  We are tempted to exchange this identity for a thousand glittering ones, which in the end will fail us.

As I was greeting people after church, someone took me to task, gently:  You didn't tell us if the story had a happy ending, he said.  He hoped there was a happy ending.

I told him that yes, the story had a happy ending, which is true, but that was all I said.

The story had a happy ending, but it took a lot of time and heartache.  There was a lot of pain for this family, a lot of prayer and bearing-with, a lot of worry about what would become of them.  Eventually this young woman returned to her family.  She has a husband and two boys, both grown.  She hasn't returned to her childhood faith, but she is doing well.

I remember sitting with her and her parents not too long ago, when we all met for the funeral of a family friend.  There we all were, sitting in a row at the church:  my mom and my brother and me, her mom and dad sitting with her and one of her sons.

Her mother is losing her memory now.  Now they have to remind her about who she is.  They have to remind her that she is beloved, that this is her name, that she is really special, that she is a child of God that she has a name. This is holy work.  This is the mission of God.

This is the mission of God:  To go out and remind people:  You are beloved.  You are children of God.

The Space Between Water and Light

On the last day of our after-Christmas vacation, the weather finally became closer to what you might expect from a Southwestern desert climate.  It was a sunny afternoon, and finally warming up enough so that we didn't need our jackets.  So, on Sunday afternoon, we took a little drive out into the desert.

My sister and brother-in-law had found the ruins of an old ghost town where they thought it would be fun to hike.  We drove down a road that I would have sworn was actually not a road ("No, that's it; that's where we are supposed to go," my sister said).  We got out of the car and stared out at the spare beauty of the desert, not seeing anything but varieties of cactus and palo verde trees.  There were no houses, no buildings, no roads that we could see.

When we got closer, though, we saw bricks, the remains of walls, some old pipes still sticking out of the ground, the last vestiges of the town that used to be there.  We hiked a bit, pointing out the clues to the former times, the times when humans prospered here, until my sister started insisting that we go and find the path to Queen Creek.

We knew it was near; we could hear it.  But the trick was finding the right path, the safe one that would take us there.  We even once looked down at the creek from a hill, but knew we could not get down to the water from there.

My brother-in-law wanted to go home; we had seen the ruins, after all.  That was the most important part.  But my sister kept talking about the creek; we couldn't go home until we found the creek.  At one point she disappeared for a little while; we thought she was lost.  But she knew where she was.  She was looking for the path to the water.

When we found it, it was just a little stream, tucked away in the middle of the ruins.  It was just a little stream, but once you saw the place, you couldn't help but notice -- in the middle of the desert, everything was starting to be green.  Green was sprouting up there.  We couldn't help it;  we just started taking pictures.  There was something shimmery there, where the light touched the water and bounced back.   It made me feel like this could be a place where secrets are revealed.

We started taking pictures of each other.   I took one of my sister, standing just in front of the creek, with the light reflecting off the water and a finger of the creek in the eeriest shade of blue.   I thought then that I knew why my sister liked this place.  She is an artist, after all, and I thought she must be attracted to the way the light and the shadows and the water all work together to make everything beautiful.

Even us.

On Sunday it be The Baptism of Our Lord, the 2nd Sunday after the Epiphany.  We hear the same gospel story every year, although a different variation.  This year the variation I am hearing is from Matthew, where Jesus is baptized by John in the river Jordan, and John doesn't want to do it.  Somehow,  in the River Jordan, the secret is revealed, and John can see it:  "I need to be baptized by you."  But Jesus knows something else, and he insists.  Somehow his being baptized will "fulfill all righteousness" whatever that means.

In my imagination I have sometimes thought that Jesus had a list, a list of all of the things he had to do to effect our salvation.  "Be baptized" was there, at the top of the list, even though, as the story goes, he had no sins to repent of.  That is what 'fulfill all righteousness' meant.

Today, though, I am imagining something else:  I am imagining Jesus and John, standing in Queen Creek.  "I need to be baptized by you," John says.  Somehow in the space between the water and the light he sees something about Jesus, something about himself.  But Jesus insists.  He insists because there is another secret that the world needs to know.

When he comes up from the water and the Spirit descends, the voice speaks.  "You are my son, the beloved."  And the Words shimmer in the space between the water and the light, and it all works together to make everything beautiful.

Even us.

Even us.

He has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, ¹as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.  (Ephesians 1:9-10)