Vacation

So, how was your vacation?  I am anticipating the question.  It often comes after some time away.  A simple, one-word answer, "Good!" is never quite sufficient.  So, today I've decided to say what this vacant time away means to me.

It is about self-care.  I cannot keep going incessantly, working day after day, week after week, weekend after weekend.  I am not God.  Yes, I know that theologically and intellectually, but sometimes I don't act like I know it.  It is important to disengage in order to reengage more faithfully.  It is important to lose focus in order regain focus and live with greater clarity.  It is important to step out of my routines and my role, to realize that life is more than what one does.  It is a gift to be cherished.

I am glad to have completed the course with my first confirmation class.  From World Communion Sunday to Pentecost Sunday was a long haul with many challenges, but I wanted to be present for our ten confirmation students.  I find myself praying for our confirmands, these newest disciples of Jesus Christ.  I am praying that the Holy Spirit will be evident in them throughout their lives and that the gift of faith will be sufficient to see them through their own challenges.  I pray that they will be filled with joy.  I pray that the community of faith will continue to be important to them.

My vacation was filled with joy at the birth of our grandson, Wyatt.  We have waited for his birth.  It is so good to be close enough to hold him and hope for a good life for him.  I pray that God will bless and keep him.  We are blessed.

My vacation was filled with some worry and waiting.  Early on, my parents took sick and were both in the ER in separate rooms with a similar illness.  It is one thing to visit the hospital as a pastor.  It is another to visit the hospital as a son.  Gratefully, both are home again and on the mend.

My vacation was sometimes disorienting.  I realize I like ministry more than I do the mundane tasks of sorting and settling, helping to manage a household.  I get depressed and disoriented when I do not have an appointment book that tells me what to do next.

My vacation brought deeper opportunities for prayer as I watched the local and national news broadcasts.  I have never prayed through a newscast before.  It may be an emerging spiritual discipline.  There is much that disturbs me in the news.  I am learning to "take it to our God in prayer."

Finally, I am reminded of the wise words of a clergy colleague who wrote an email to bless me on my way on the eve of my sabbatical in 2012.  Dick knew that I was reluctant to go away for three months.  My goal in that sabbatical was to get out of my role and need to control in the New Hampshire Conference of the United Church of Christ.  The pastor said that sabbatical was a matter of trusting in God--a foretaste of times to come--retirement and, yes, even death, when I would need to release my grip on life and not be defined by my work.  In a similar way, a vacation is about growing in trust and entrusting myself to God who brings order from chaos and chaos from order, who resurrects the dead, and whose love in Christ never lets go of me.

I am grateful for the time, for this vacation.

Creator God, who hallowed the seventh day of creation as sabbath time and who modeled that even on that silent seventh day when Jesus lay dead in his tomb, help me to remember my own need for sabbath time.  You are God; I am not.  That, indeed, is good news!  Thank you!  Amen.

Ascension Day

It was just another ordinary day.  Nothing different than the day before.  I met with other church staff members in the morning; enjoyed a lunchtime conversation with some catching up; and made some pastoral visits in the afternoon.  It was an unremarkable Ascension Day.

That was not the case on the first Ascension Day, as Luke tells the story (Luke 24:50-55 and Acts 1:6-11).  Then, it was a big day.  The Risen Christ disappeared into the clouds and left his disciples alone again.  It was a mysterious moment.  There had to be feelings of uncertainty and a abandonment. There may well have been a return of those difficult feelings from Good Friday.  As their ears  received the parting promise, "This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven," their hearts surely ached with confusion and sadness.  This was a big change.  This was another loss.

Arriving forty days after Easter, Ascension Day always falls on a Thursday.  Who has time to do anything different on Ascension Day?  It used to be that Ascension Day was the Mission Festival in the church of my youth.  There would be preaching in the morning and afternoon by someone who had experienced the foreign mission field firsthand.  Missionaries would come to enlarge our understanding and appreciation for the church's work in places like India and Honduras.  There would be an abundant lunch and visiting together in the shade under the towering maple trees.  It was a full day.  Farmers and business folk would take the day off to spend it at church on Ascension Day.  That was a long time ago, before the church became preoccupied with its own maintenance and survival.  We knew the world was large, and so was the purpose and mission of the church in those days.

In nearly forty years of ordained ministry, I cannot remember a time that I led or attended an Ascension Day worship service.  Now it is just another ordinary day--a very busy day.  I didn't have time to gaze up into heaven and wonder where Jesus had gone or whether he might be coming back soon.  (I am writing this in the morning hours following Ascension Day because I did not take the time to write during the day itself.)

Perhaps the reason that Ascension Day has slipped from our liturgical life is not so much that it happens during a work day, but that we do not want to face the fact that the Risen Christ is absent from us.  Waiting is difficult.  While he is away, we stay busy to avoid the feeling of grief that would quickly appear if we stopped.   So, we do something familiar to fill the time.  There is comfort in the routine of an ordinary day.  But, I wonder whether such busyness is really faithfulness.  Is it the best way to trust the promise that power will come when we wait?

And so, on this day after the Ascension, I confess my need to work and not wait.  I confess my resistance to change and loss.  I confess that I do not like the reality of an exalted, but absent Jesus.  Maybe next year, we will have a special Ascension Day service.  Or maybe we will, at least, remember that it is Ascension Day.  Maybe.

Friends and Friendliness

In the United Church of Christ Ministerial Code, those who serve in the church make this promise:  "Relying on the grace of God, I covenant with my ministry setting to preach and teach the gospel without fear or favor, regarding all persons with equal respect and concern, and undertaking to minister impartially."

I have seen the destructive effects of breaking this promise.  In times of conflict, pastors are tempted to sort a congregation into camps--my supporters verses my detractors, my friends verses my foes.  Moving beyond ministering "impartially" can have a devastating impact on a church for decades to come.  It is not only unwise to have friends in the church; it is unprofessional and unethical. 

I am thinking a lot about friendship this week because the gospel text from John 15:9-17 is about friendship with Jesus.  He says, "I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father" (Jn. 15:15, NRSV).  Friendship with Jesus is to be drawn into the circle of awareness.  Friends are trusted.  They receive full disclosure of what God is doing.

I can remember a pastor who went to lunch every week with the same couples in the congregation.  There was a specialness and familiarity in the relationship that did not extend to other members.  I do not know the level of conversation that occurred in those weekly lunches, but there was the appearance of closeness and friendship.  I suspect that those friends of the pastor were more deeply aware of things that were happening.  They may also have had first-hand knowledge of their pastor's heart.  As a young member in the church, I was never included in those table conversations.  I was not invited.  How does one undertake to "minister impartially" in such a scenario? 

Here's what I believe to be faithful to the code of conduct:   I will be friendly toward all and to be present with all for the sake of the gospel of Jesus Christ, but I cannot be the friend of a few.  Ministering impartially means that all receive my time and attention.  All are respected and have a right to expect that I will be available for counsel and care.  All can trust that I will maintain appropriate professional boundaries and keep confidences.  My sermons are not preached to win friends or to ostracize enemies. 

I am writing this today to reflect and to remind myself of my calling, for it is a high and challenging calling.  It would be far easier, to say, "These are my friends, my advocates, my benefactors in ministry.  I will allow their insights and influence to shape my ministry."  For the sake of the church that is and will yet be,  I will be friendly, but I cannot be a friend.