Practicing resurrection - part five

We talked about growing up in faith today - and giving up any adolescent sense of the nature of the church, too - which always a lot of fun. The heart of the message had to do with "no more prolonged infancies among us, please" as Peterson puts Ephesians 4: 14 so that we might live "a life worthy of the calling God has shared with us." Next week, on the occasion of our annual meeting, we'll talk about God's calling - and how we embrace it - but that is for next week. Today, it was enough to think about how we're to grow up into adult people of faith and leave all the baby Christian stuff behind.

Two important clues have to do with living into my job as pastor and trusting Christ's subversive presence within and among us. Wendell Berry has collected his Sabbath poems from over a 20 year period in a lovely volume entitled: A Timbered Choir. Every Sunday he walks around his small Kentucky farm - and it's woodland - and writes a poem. Peterson has noted that as Berry embraces the land he has been called to - "respects it, cares for it, submits himself to it just as an artist submits to her materials" he - Eugene Peterson - inserts the word "parish" wherever Berry speaks of land or farm. In this, he helps articulate a clear sense of how a pastor can help her/his congregation grow up in faith.

The pastor's question is, "Who are these particular people and how can I be with them in such a way that they can become what God is making them?" My job is simply to be there, teaching, preaching Scripture as well as I can and being honest with them - not doing anything to interfere with what the Spirit is shaping in them... Am I willing to be quiet for a day, a week, a year? Like Wendell Berry, am I willing to spend fifty years reclaiming this land - with these people?

The pastor's work with the people, it seems, is to find ways of sharing what God is already doing - or notice where God is already leading - and help folk glimpse something of this reality, too. There is nothing heavy-handed or shame-based about it even though lots of pastors never grasp this truth. Rather this patient work for being church is all about living in God's time, not ours or any other sense of time.

And what I've discovered in three and a half years is that God is calling us to be a very intentional SMALL faith community. We were once the mega-church back before mega-churches existed. We set the tone for the culture, we gathered all the powerful and wealthy elite. And finances flowed NOT because everyone did their fair share, but because when a problem came up the bankers would meet at the country club and write a check to cover the hole. Now, we are neither wealthy nor powerful and there aren't any bankers or millionaires left to bail us out. So now we have to get to know one another more tenderly - pray and listen to one another in new ways, too - and trust that together we can hear God's still gentle calling.

I've discovered that we have to do it with joy, too. Gratitude not obligation is our working slogan - celebration in all things is essential - and honestly sharing our real lives in community. Compassion is another key for us in this discovery of what is making of us - compassion and lots and lots of patience. This is how I think we are coming to embrace Peterson's commitment to being subversive like Jesus. He writes:

Jesus' favorite speech form, the parable, was subversive. Parables sound absolutely ordinary: casual stories about soil and seeds, meals and coins and sheep, bandits and victims, farmers and merchants. And they are wholly secular: of his forty or so parables recorded in the Gospels only one has its setting in a church and only a couple mention the name of God... So people relaxed their defenses. They walked away perplexed, wondering what they meant, these stories lodged in their imaginations. And then, like a time bomb, they would explode in their unprotected hearts... Jesus WAS talking about God after all - and they had been invaded. Jesus continually threw odd stories down alongside ordinary lives (para - alongside - bole - thrown) and then walked away without explanation or altar call.

It would seem that just like Jesus, then, a pastor needs to share the stories and songs - new and old - and then get out of the way as God and our hearts take over. Little by little, I think that is what I have seen God saying to us. We don't always get it perfectly, to be sure, and certainly not all at once. This sense of being a joyful, intentional community of faith is very uneven work.

But after worship we had a "budget hearing" for our mission and ministry work for 2011 - and it was a very adult and loving gathering. We are still wrestling with financial concerns and will likely spend more than we take in; but that truth was held in relationship to both the growth and renewal that God is working within and among us, too.

As one wise teacher said, "When I was moderator of this church (about a hundred years ago) I was told that we were going to go under if we didn't change our ways.
Apparently that is something that has always been said - and now look at us -growing and engaged in God's mission in a whole new way." No altar calls, no ponderous explanations: just a lot of teaching and prayer and trust that God is at work.

It ALL has to do with growing up in faith, yes? And when it was all done, a young man told me he had narrowed down the seminaries he wanted to apply for and wondered if I would write a reference? Man, after a day like this I KNOW it is all worth it...