Pacing the cage...

Old Jean Calvin was a wise old soul - an anxious old soul, too (and that causes us tons of problems today, but he had plenty to worry about) - but a truly wise old soul.  One of his insights is that when we come to truly know ourselves, we also come to know the Lord. (Or at least as much of the Lord as we can know at this moment in time.) And the inverse is equally true:  when we come to know God we also come to know something of ourselves.

Now most of the time I know enough about myself to "let go and let God." My inclination is to try and fix things - but most of the time I have come to know that I have neither enough wisdom, power or time to fix things - so after a period of anxiety (it varies) I am able to revert to the default mode of the Serenity Prayer.

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
 
Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next.
Amen.

As Niebuhr has written elsewhere, human beings are simultaneously blessed and cursed with the capacity for introspection:  it gives us just enough insight to believe that we are smarter than we really are - and that is a recipe for trouble.  So, mostly I have embraced this truth as part of the human condition and know that I have to regularly repent by returning to God's wisdom that knows the difference between what I can fix and what is beyond me.  In knowing myself, I come to know something of God.

What often triggers a delay in my repentance, however, is when I become overly busy with institutional tasks (not enough time for rest and reflection) or when church finances go south (and I feel judged.) Both cloud my vision and drag me down for a time - both make me resentful and exhausted - and I should know this by now:  after all, I've been doing it for over 30 years. But, it would seem that I am a very slow learner... I like when M. Craig Barnes writes:

"When a church board becomes anxious about the budget that's in the red, the pastor cannot react anxiously by taking on the role of a fund-raiser who fixes the problem. What is called for are the strange poetic statements to the congregation that it needs to give its money not because the church has needs, but because we need to be givers. "Fool, this night thy should shall be required of thee; then whose shall those things be which you have provided?" (Luke 12:20 KJV in The Pastor as Minor Poet, p. 24)

Both he and Eugene Peterson help me get out of my cranky/tired rut by reminding me that MY calling is NOT to fix things.  In fact, Peterson makes a huge distinction between the historic job of the pastor and running a church: one is about the cure of the soul and the other is about administration.  And while I have come to discover that there is a ministry of hospitality in good administration, "reducing pastoral work to institutional duties" robs this work of joy, integrity and depth.  It takes time - and quiet reflection - to be about the cure of a soul.  It takes love and prayer and patience, too.

And because most of our churches are filled with problems, sometimes it is easier to get into the mode of a fixer:  "It is satisfying to help make the rough places smooth."

The difficulty is that problems arrive in such a constant flow that problem solving becomes full-time work.  And if the pastor is useful and does it well, we will miss how the pastoral vocation of soul cure is subverted. Gabriel Marcel wrote that life is not so much a problem to be solved as a mystery to be explored. That is certainly the biblical stance: life is not something we manage to hammer together and keep in repair by our wits; it is an unfathomable gift. We are immersed in mysteries: incredible love, confounding evil, the creation, the cross, grace, God.

Peterson concludes - and this is very helpful for me - that the secularized mind is terrorized by mysteries. "Thus it makes lists, labels people, assigns roles and solves problems. But a solved life is a reduced life."

(For these tightly buttoned-up people never take great faith risks or make convincing love talk. They deny and ignore the mysteries and diminish human existence to what can be managed, controlled and fixed... Pastors cast in the role of spiritual technologists are hard put to keep that role from absorbing everything else, since there are so many things that need to be and can, in fact, be fixed... If pastors become accomplices in treating every child as a problem to be figured out, every spouse as a problem to be dealt with, every clash of wills in choir or committee as a problem to be adjudicated, we abdicate our most important work, which is directing worship in the traffic, discovering the presence of the cross in the paradoxes and chaos between Sundays, calling attention to the "splendor in the ordinary" and, most of all, teaching a life of prayer to our friends and companions in the pilgrimage. (Contemplative Pastor, pp. 64-65)

I have been a little run down - stressed and cranky - and I know why:  our annual meeting is coming up this Sunday.  And while most of my leadership team is very supportive, I have still been treating some of our realities as problems to be solved and managed. I have not been in repentance/trust mode. I have not been paying attention to what God is telling me through me.  But thank heaven for the Sabbath (today for me) and the chance to be still and know, yes? 

My triggers about tasks and finances are not the center of the universe, neither are my worries about the specifics of ministry the totality of God's grace. They are invitations to change directions and rest in God's presence.  Barnes retells a story from the life of Barbara Brown Taylor who discovered that she had been weeping on a regular basis.  She writes:

I realized (in my tears) how little interest I had in defending Christian beliefs. The part of the Christian story that had drawn me into the Church were not the believing parts but the beholding parts.  Behold I bring you good news of a great joy... Behold, the Lamb of God... Behold, I stand at the door and knock... Whether the narratives starred hayseed shepherds confronted by hosts of glittering angels or desert pilgrims watching something like a dove descend upon a man in a river as a voice from heaven called him, "Beloved," Christian faith seemed to depend on beholding things that were clearly beyond belief.

And so it is time to be still (some more) today and tomorrow and behold and know, too - not fix problems.  For as m chosen text for preaching on Sunday says:  What doth the Lord requre of thee but to do justly, love mercy and walk humbly with thy God?