25 Years of I Do and I Will (With the Help of God) - Part 2 of 2
Last parts of reflecting upon the questions I responded to 25 years ago...
Picking up from yesterday’s part 1 of reflecting back on 25 years of ordained ministry with the last four questions....
Will you in your own life seek to follow the Lord Jesus Christ, love your neighbors, and work for the reconciliation of the world?
So as I read this question, I wonder why do we have “seek” here but not in the prior ones? Is it a recognition that these three things are hard and we are going to do them really well and times we are going to be far from it? In some ways, this question feels like a parallel one to the earlier about “fulfilling your office in obedience to Jesus Christ...” Here, though, it is about me as a person trying to follow the Way of Jesus and not me specifically as a person being ordained as a Teaching Elder (our new term for Minister of Word & Sacrament). What I am hearing here is whether I will seek to have congruence between who I am as an individual follower of Jesus and who I am as a pastor?
Wow - that is a big question. Because that requires a lot of vulnerability. It requires letting people in...which...I do not do so very well. As a person rooted at 5 on the Enneagram, I do a lot of compartmentalizing of who knows what about me. Ask my wife about this. 😬
About 5 or 6 years into my ministry at my first congregation, my wife said something that really got to the heart of this One Sunday afternoon, as we were talking about my sermon from that morning she said, “You know, you don’t always sound like you when you’re up there.” At that point, I was still following the process I was taught in seminary for sermon preparation and was still putting together a manuscript from which I shared my message. She suggested I try a few weeks to go without the manuscript and see what happens. Since that time, I think I have manuscripted less than 10 messages.1 This dovetailed a few years later in a preaching mentorship I did with a wonderfully gifted preacher. Chip helped me to see that my preaching was excellent in the head information (the “logos” in the language we were using) and in me embodying myself in the message (the “ethos”) but as Chip said, “You suck at the pathos.” The pathos was the emotional side of a message.
At the time, I was going through the early stages of my transformation at that time and was really finally starting to learn what these weird things called emotions actually are in my life. So no wonder they weren’t much a part of what I shared before then. But as I have dug deeper, I feel like I have grown a lot in that area (even though it is still a challenge). I feel. I have grown to be far more real and integrated in my ministry and in my life.
My office is another reflection of this. My offices at my first two congregations were ones that were showing off my intellectual and academic chops. Bookshelves were FILLED with books from seminary and from the ongoing reading I was doing. One wall of my offices had my undergraduate, seminary, and Doctor of Ministry degrees along with several other framed certificates from programs I had done. You walk in and the office says, “PASTOR.” But if you visit my office today...there are few books on shelves and what has replaced them and replaced the wall of degrees are my photographs and other things that speak to important moments in my life and deep passions. There are a fair amount of legos, Star Wars things, gifts from family and friends, and it doesn’t say “PASTOR” as much as it says, “Ed.” One of our church members noted this when she said that when she comes into my office, it feels like “The Museum of Ed.”
I share all this because it reflects that sense of trying to find congruence between who I am as a person, as a husband, as a father, as a friend, as a pastor. So yeah - trying to follow Jesus, love my neighbor, and work for the reconciliation of the world? Trying to do that in my own life - yes and trying to live congruently between who I am as Ed and who I am as a pastor. So...
(Taking a deep breath)...I will.
Do you promise to further the peace, unity, and purity of the church?
Before I started seminary, my pastor, Peter Barnes, gave me a book called Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity by Eugene Peterson. I have returned to that book many times over the years as a reminder of the core practices of being a pastor - prayer, reading Scripture, and spiritual direction - and the importance of trying to keep those angles even with one another (emphasis on trying). These three things from this question feel similarly. Peace, unity, and purity - trying to keep their angles equal to one another.
As a follower of Jesus and as a pastor, I feel I am called to be a peace maker first and foremost and not just a peace keeper. (See the Sermon on the Mount). Being a peace maker is trying to create the spaces where peace can grow from within an individual person, to in a faith community, to wider work for peace in communities and in the world. Peace keeping, however, is more about just getting people to play nice with each other and I’ve been called into many moments of doing lots of that.
I was unexpectedly thrown into moderating a shouting match between two colleagues as they stormed into my office after a particularly contentious meeting down the hall. There wasn’t peace making at that moment - I was just trying to get them both to settle down and hear one another. I literally had to lead them through the “NAME, can you repeat back what NAME just said” type of practice. And peace-keeping has had to be a reality in space where there was a lot of unresolved conflict that boiled up more often than anyone would like and it felt like peace-whack-a-mole. Peace-making is a lot harder when those non-peaceful-moles keep popping their heads up.
But being a peace maker is opening myself up to be used by the Spirit to create spaces where people can be real with one another, be honest with one another, be vulnerable with one another, trust one another, and begin to fully see one another as the beautiful children of God that they are, each of whom reflects the image of God. In the congregation I currently serve, this is part of the process we are working with in our Open and Affirming Process as we work to understand how we are called to live out what it means to embrace all as we journey the Way of Jesus. We’re not all in the same place in this process but we’re all in it together. So, how am I creating those safe spaces for people and allowing the Spirit to work on hearts and minds and lives even when we see the world in vastly different ways?
But there’s a balance here with the other two - unity and purity. It is easy to mix up unity and uniformity in the church. We read passages like Acts 4:42-47 where it talks about how the early followers held all things in common and it feels like a pretty amazing thing. But just go a few chapters later and you see that there was not uniformity in the church - there were differences and divisions and a lot of the early part of Acts are stories of the church trying to navigate those early choppy waters. But even when they struggle through things, there is still a deep heart for unity and how they remember that they are all in this together.
That’s why I have this image for today - John August Swanson’s painting, The Storm, which hangs in our living room. Swanson painted this beautiful piece to reflect of how we are all in the boat together even though we’re all different and beautifully unique. This print is such a perfect representation of this deep truth of what God calls us to.
And that balances with purity. When I first answered this question, I probably read this word as being more about morals and specific practices. Am I being faithful to my wife? Am I not stealing? Am I being honest and truthful? And that is absolutely still a part of it. But what I hear in it now is a wider sense of allowing ourselves to be gradually shaped more and more into the fullness of who God desires us to be. What I long to see in people today (and in myself) is a growth towards recovering who we ultimately are and what we ultimately are is that which Genesis speaks of when God looked at all of creation and said “wow - this is very very good.”
That’s where we started and that reality is hidden by sin, by brokenness, by woundedness, by a whole host of things. What I read of the stories of Jesus and what I have experienced in my own life is that this way of Jesus isn’t simply about “stopping sinful practices” but it is about being transformed and healed and finding a deeper and more vibrant wholeness. This purity to me isn’t about “puritanism” but instead the refining of letting go all of that which drags us down and leads us to see ourselves and others as anything other than the beautiful unique children of God that we are.
Do I promise to further all these things?
I’m sure going to try.
Will you seek to serve the people with energy, intelligence, imagination, and love?
Honestly, this is my favorite question of all of them. I love this question because it is such a wholistic question. It isn’t just about being an energizer bunny trying to get everyone excited and feeling happy and moving around. It isn’t just about someone who can think their way through just about anything (cough...Ed...cough). It isn’t just about someone dreaming about what can be and visioning something that isn’t yet realized. And it isn’t just about someone trying to bring people together in deep and significant relationship. It is about all of them.
What I have come to recognize in this question is how I don’t have to have all of these things at one time running at full power. I need to give myself grace to know that at times, I’ll have the energy and other times I won’t and the same for each of the other things in this question. But to seek to serve the people with this is a reminder that I need to do this with others.
There are people who have far more energy than me (I’m sitting next to my amazing enthusiast enneagram 7 wife as I am writing this) and I need to let them be the ones who bring that energy to the ministry. There are times when someone knows more than me (which as an Enneagram 5 is VERY HARD to admit) and I need to trust that they may know a better path. I need to dream with the dreamers who have visions for what can be and who are envisioning something that I cannot see. And love - I am humbled by the ways that I have seen love lived out in tangible ways in the church but notably in the ways that I see sacrificial love shared - people giving of their time and their energies in ways that I sometimes find hard to do. I started to write out a list but like before, there would be someone accidentally left off but so many of you have shown this love.
One specific on love, however - I have to speak to the beautiful congregation I serve right now. In this community there are so many examples of this where love is lived out through meals, through phone calls, through presence, through hugs, through reminders of important days, through honest love and support for one another and for ministry staff. Deep love is in the DNA of this congregation and it is a truly remarkable thing to witness, experience, and be a part of.
So will I seek to serve the people with energy, intelligence, imagination, and love?
I will, but I know that part of my response is that I will be serving through the energy, intelligence, imagination, and love of others.
Will you be a faithful minister of Word and Sacrament, proclaiming the good news, teaching faith and caring for people? Will you be active in government and discipline, serving in the councils of the church; and in your ministry will you try to show the love and justice of Jesus Christ?
And so we come to the last one which is the one question in the PCUSA that is different when we are ordaining Teaching Elders, Ruling Elders, and Deacons. The other questions that come before this one are all the same. This last one is different for each office (except for the last line). So for this final question, I’m going to make it (relatively) short because it feels to me that I have spoken to so much of what this question is asking.
Will I try to be a faithful minister? I will try, with the help of God.
Will I proclaim the good news through teaching faith and through care? Again, I will try with the help of God.
Will I be active in the the other bodies of the church? I will try because I know that we’re all in this together...all of us. I will try, with the help of God.
And in my ministry will I try to show the love and justice of Jesus Christ? Yes, I will try, but in the love, grace, and power of God.
These have been two really long posts and, if you have made it this far, I thank you and I hope that they have made some measure of sense and have spoken to you of something for your own life and not simply a vanity project of my own of reflecting back on 25 years. But I want to close to connect back to where I started yesterday with all those things that have taken place since June 27, 1999. There’s a lot and 25 years is a lot of time. But all of what I have shared in these two posts is only a fraction of the larger work of what God has been doing in me, in you, in the world. We see small glimpses and rarely the whole. We can connect some of the dots and see how A led to B led to C and so forth. But there are a lot of Gs and Rs and Xs that are waiting to be connected.
As I was writing this today, Diana Butler Bass shared a reflection on last night’s presidential debate and she included these words from the brilliant and beautiful Jesuit theologian, scientist, and philosopher Teilhard de Chardin that speak to the slow work of God and how we only see these small glimpses....
Patient Trust, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ2
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.
Amen.
Those messages were fully written out because they were getting into some subjects where I needed to be sure that I was saying things in a very specific way.
https://www.ignatianspirituality.com/prayer-of-theilhard-de-chardin/