The Gift of Being Part of the Cloud

The plane was late getting home, but for once the delay was almost a positive.  In a strange sort of way it served to sustain the glow of the day.  I traveled on Saturday back to the "fatherland" -- not simply Texas, but my hometown of Abilene, Texas -- on the occasion of my home church's 125th anniversary celebration.  I would be filling the pulpit during the worship service.  It wasn't without some trepidation.  After reading my sermon to Lori on Saturday morning she hesitantly asked, "are you going to be able to get through it?"  Emotional poignancy, after all, is rarely lost on me.  I speculated, by way of reply, that I didn't anticipate much likelihood that I would.  Laura, our longtime family friend -- informal "daughter" to my mother and "sister" to me -- was so certain that I would be a bundle of nerves that she presented me with a pocket cross just before the service began for added strength to hold onto. 

For the record, I only experienced one major knot in my throat.  On the phone from the airport I could proudly report home that I had, indeed, "gotten through it,"  although I wouldn't call it my most effective delivery.  Which is not to take anything away from the occasion.  Homecomings necessarily take on almost surreal qualities -- echoing memories that can almost be louder than the voices actually present; phantom faces of beloved pillars no longer alive, but present in the same way that amputees experience phantom feelings of limbs no longer there.  So many things have changed -- the carpet, the furnishings, the arrangement of the rooms, the staff, the town; but mysteriously and inexplicably almost nothing has changed.  Such is the power of nostalgic projection.

Notwithstanding visits through the years, I have now been away from Abilene much longer than I actually lived there, but in immutable ways it is nonetheless still home.  Perhaps that sense is further confirmation of the oft-cited conclusion that the character of certain times, however brief, will always trump the quantity of other times less formative.  Whoever I might have become had other cities, other congregations shaped my world, and whatever role genetics no doubt play, the fact remains that I am who I have become in large measure because of the fingerprints of those people and that community on my very soul.  I can no longer find my way to very many places around town -- whole neighborhoods have emerged since I've been gone -- but the primary arteries of the city are stamped on the inside of my eyelids.  I no longer know the ins and outs of congregational life there; no longer could tell you what is behind every door in the building, but the fact that for many years throughout my childhood and youth I could has left an indelible mark on the way I look at faith and discipleship and the very nature of the Body of Christ.

Before and after the service, people were gracious -- perhaps even proud.  I might more honestly describe them as "charitable."  But that, I now realize, was beside the point.  What I in my bundle of nerves and apprehension had lost sight of is the fact that it never was a matter of how well I might or might not "do" in the midst of their celebration.  It wasn't about performance, but presence.  Like the family they genuinely are, they were present to love me no matter what -- happy simply to welcome me home.

I, of course, was only part of the day.  While I might have been narcissistically focused on me and the contribution I might make, all of us present were simply emblematic of the hundreds or thousands of others who have animated congregational life in that place over the course of a century and a quarter.

It was wonderful to see old and familiar faces.  It was a delight to wander those halls and look at the pictures on the walls and to laugh at old stories and remembered experiences.  It was humbling to reconnect with many who had driven some distance to gather there once again.  And it was certainly an honor to preach for the gathering -- to be invited to bring something of the Way and the Word.  But the comprehension that ultimately filled and redeemed the extra airport hours at the end of the day was the inspiring sense of being one moist and airy molecule in that great cloud of witnesses.  That is gift, indeed.

Shooting Ourselves in our Ecclesiastical Foot

Young people aren't coming to church. That's the revolutionary finding of a recent survey by LifeWay Research. According to the report, seven in ten Protestants ages 18-30 who went to church regularly in high school say they quit attending by age 23 and over a third of those dropouts had still not found their way back to the sanctuary by the time they turned 30. What has turned them off? The people they experienced there -- and, of course, the pastors. According to the survey, the dropouts found us "judgmental, hypocritical or insincere." Ouch! That hurts, but it isn't that surprising. It is something of a job description for teenagers to view older adults as judgmental "sell-outs" who have lost track of their ideals and dreams and basic integrity in order to make a buck and get along. I'm not sure that adults in the church are any worse in those categories than others -- but then perhaps our teenagers and young adults are simply disappointed to observe that we are not better.

What really caught my attention in the report was the 52% of respondents who "had religious, ethical or political reasons for quitting." Religious reasons for leaving the church? Ethical reasons? I recognize that it is dangerous to read too much into simple statistics, but the notion that a critical mass of people find the church to be detrimental to their faith experience ought to give us "church folk" cause to pause. Find us irritating. Find us disappointing. Even find us to be failures in our quest to be effective and faithful disciples, but God forbid that someone find us detrimental, counter-productive and ultimately destructive to the cause of Christ.

If I understand at all the mission of Christ's followers, it is to function as a sign, foretaste, and instrument of God's coming reign. We are to be, as the Apostle Paul characterized it, "letters of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts" (2 Corinthians 3:3). If the results of the survey are to be believed, we are functioning more like junk mail than letters of recommendation.

I stay awake at night imagining the kind of church from which people could not bear to stay away. Some people are sure that church has everything to do with programmatic, theatrical flame, sizzle and fizz, but I am more and more convinced that it has to do with a manifest integrity between word and work; with passion for and depth of commitment to the God who has found and embraced them; and determined hospitality.

But then the prophet Micah already said that --
"God has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" (6:8)

Now, if we could only do it more consistently, more transparently, more joyfully.

On Whose Hands Really Matter

I don't think he meant it personally, but the Pope this week declared me invalid. It's a hard thing coming from someone who has never met me, but I've certainly been called worse. In a new statement released Wednesday, Pope Benedict XVI gave ecumenism a real boost by declaring the Roman Catholic Church the only real church, alone possessing the means to salvation, and that the clergy of those non-Catholic churches -- however nice and helpful they may be -- are ultimately firing blanks because they lack apostolic succession.

I mean no disrespect, but I think the Pope could benefit from a fresh reading of the book of Acts, in which protocols -- the "right" ways of doing things -- and boundaries and ideas about the "only true church" were quite regularly ripped apart in the face of evidence demonstrating that God's Spirit quite gleefully and regularly ignored them. I rather thought the Gospel message itself was an assault on such limiting thinking about who "qualifies," who is "acceptable," and who are Christ's mother and brothers (see Matthew 12:46-48).

But that's his business. As to non-Catholic churches being absent the power of salvation, I can only say that's not been my experience. And as to my personal lack of apostolic authority, it is true that Peter did not lay his hands on me through the ordination of his direct successors. But all this talk has made me think again of those under whose hands I was ordained -- "lay" people like Albert McAllister and Tom Brittain and Royce Farnsworth and Jack Fulwiler and Dutch Schultz and others; clergy mentors like Jim Oglesby and Larry Keefauver and Earl Bissex and my Dad -- and I can say theirs felt heavy enough.

As far as I'm concerned, Peter's hands would have been just fine that precious ordination day -- if, that is, those other, and frankly preferable, ones had not been available.

Comfortable with the Dessert Days

"I'm decades past my salad days, and even past the main course: maybe I'm in my cheese days -- sitting atop the lettuce leaves on the table for a while now with all the other cheese balls, but with much nutrition to offer, and still delicious. Or maybe I'm in my dessert days, the most delicious course. Whatever you call it, much of the stuff I used to worry about has subsided -- what other people think of me, and of how I am living my life. I give these things the big shrug. Mostly. Or at least eventually. It's a huge relief."

(Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, p. 173)

I do not say this proudly. And yet there is no embarrassment, either. I have managed to be included in an internet listserv group of colleagues who are commendably passionate about their topic. They write -- continuously, it often seems -- and they pose questions; they recommend resources and they exude seriousness and devotion and faithful determination. Except for that crack about the volume of their posting, nothing said here is meant to imply criticism. I admire them. Indeed -- and here is the part that feels odd to say -- I remember when I was one of them.

I remember attending a conference several months after graduating from seminary and reconnecting with several of my classmates. Some months now out in the "real world," we reflected together on what we had experienced. Generally, we were happy and committed to what we were doing. But we had frustrations -- and some evaporation of what could have been the naive conscientiousness of beginning ministry.

Returning home and mentioning this gathering to a colleague, he asked what we had shared with each other. "We commiserated that we had spent all this time in seminary wrestling with, learning about, dreaming into some comprehension of what the church is called to be, and then we get out into the church and discover not only that the church isn't what it is called to be -- that part didn't surprise us -- but that no one in the church seems to care. That part has been hard." "Yes," my colleague responded, "how do we communicate that to the seminary?" I replied, "We were wondering how we communicate that to the church!"

But years have passed. And it's not that I no longer care -- I do, at least as passionately as I did in the midst of that conversation. It's just that having those conversations doesn't get me out of bed any longer. They are important discussions, and I am glad that my friends on the internet are having them. But I have yet to enter the fray. It just gives me no sizzle.

It may be because I am older, although I don't think that fully explains it. I could have become cynical, and there probably is something to that. I have given up on some of the idealisms I once tried to shove down the throat of this committee or that board. I have less optimism about the salvific effects of this strategy or that innovation. It could, I suppose, be burnout, but I don't feel burned out. I feel joyful, humbly grateful for the opportunity to stretch my soul in the direction of God's imagination.

Finally, I think I've simply relaxed in these dessert days of my life and life work. The manifold ways the church continues to disappoint doesn't distress me nearly as much as it used to, at least in part because I have gained a deeper appreciation for the ways the church, in subtler and less obtrusive ways -- in the person of countless and precious individuals I have the privilege of visiting in the hospital, attending as they die, celebrating with as they marry, gasping with as they emerge from baptismal waters, and arguing with at Board Meetings -- actually does thrive as a sign, a foretaste, and an instrument of God's coming reign.

Grateful. Humbled. Sometimes -- often even -- inspired. Imagine that.

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