Month: September 2016

“All who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves.” (I Cor. 11:29)

The first Sunday in October is designated as World Communion Sunday, which celebrates our oneness in Christ with all our brothers and sisters around the world. Paul tells us that we are to “discern the body” when we partake of Holy Communion, mindful that we note our relationship to all our brothers and sisters in Christ in the celebration. One is not to go hungry while another is drunk! (I Cor. 11:21). This is scandalous behavior opposed to the Way of Christ. Thus it is appropriate that World Communion Sunday is also a time when we receive the Neighbors in Need (NIN) Offering as a way of continuing the ancient Christian practice of sharing what we have with brothers and sisters in need.

World Communion Sunday (originally called World Wide Communion Sunday) is a gift of the Presbyterian Church to the larger ecumenical church. The first celebration occurred at Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, PA, in 1933 where Dr. Hugh Thompson Kerr served as pastor. Donald Kerr explained how the idea of World Communion Sunday spread from that first service to the world wide practice of today, “The concept spread very slowly at the start. People did not give it a whole lot of thought. It was during the Second World War that the spirit caught hold, because we were trying to hold the world together. World Wide Communion symbolized the effort to hold things together, in a spiritual sense. It emphasized that we are one in the Spirit and the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

St. John’s United Church of Christ will – as part of their World Communion Sunday observance – receive the NIN offering on October 2, 2016. Through the Neighbors in Need offering, the church expresses a common commitment to justice and compassion throughout the United States and Puerto Rico. One-third of the offering undergirds the work of the Council for American Indian Ministry (CAIM), including much-needed financial support for 20 American Indian congregations in the UCC. Two-thirds of Neighbors in Need supports program initiatives and direct grants offered by the UCC’s Justice and Witness Ministries. Small but essential grants are made throughout the year to congregations and organizations engaged in community organizing, public policy advocacy, and direct service. Although grants are made to address a wide range of justice priorities, a significant portion of these grants are made to address issues of hunger and poverty. You can learn more about these ministries when you read their Transformational Stories.

This is not my story. It is a generic, aggregate story that includes aspects of my own and that of many colleagues. I am writing this because over the course of my ministry experience I have trained pastoral interns and helped people pursue their calls to ministry. Currently I am working with a couple of people who are on the edge between step 1 and 2 and another in the middle of 3. Whatever you are looking for in ministry, do not look for certainty. A lot of different folks become pastors for a lot of different reasons. I can only speak for my little corner of the world of mainline Protestantism. Our formation to ministry works something like this:

First, you feel called by God.
That can be because of your upbringing in church. You came up the ranks form Sunday school kid to youth leader. and you just stuck with it because church feels good. A lot of times feeling the call happens in defiance of your church experience. Your church rejected you for you who are and you thought God was as cruel as they were. But then you discovered God to be different.

Second, you feel a good about that call.
You get excited and you start the official discernment process. You learn about educational requirements and church requirements. Eventually you decide to tackle the biggest hurdle and pick a school to obtain your Master of Divinity degree.

Third, your whole world comes tumbling down.
In seminary everything you believed in, everything you thought was right or wrong is turned upside down. You may have been a practical Saint like mother Teresa and in Step 1 and you felt the call to be just that for the rest of your professional life. Or you may have been a righteous thinker who can tell right from wrong and protect the truth and values of the Christian faith against heretics and atheists. Serious graduate level work will show you that your orthodoxy is worthless without a similar passion for orthopraxy. Whatever you came in as, you will come out changed and hopefully more balanced.

Fourth, you get your first call.
Usually you start out as somebody else’s associate pastor. The greatest danger here is a feel-good-experience. You may be sent to do children and youth ministry. That way you feel like you did when you first felt the call. You fall back into old uneducated patterns and have a jolly good time. You love your job and everybody loves you.

Fifth, it is time to grow up.
Eventually you will have to step up and become your own pastoral self. All of a sudden you are “the pastor”. The first year or so feels really good. In this honeymoon period you do everything for the first time. Your congregation feels the excitement of having your new energy among them. You learn to figure out who you are as a pastor. Roughly 10 years into the process you start to learn who you want to be when you grow up.

Sixth, ministry is hard.
On a practical level serving in ministry means working for a non-profit organization. If they are large, they may have a lot of politics going on, staffing issues, policies and procedures. If they are small, they may lack a clear vision of their mission, they may be happy with maintaining the status quo, or they simply do not feel strong enough to do anything meaningful at all.

Seventh, you succeed and fail.
In some ministry settings you may be able to leave a lasting legacy or make a big impact. Some you may have sustained for a few years and then moved on. Others again you may have profoundly hurt.

It is okay and necessary to be excited about the initial call.
It is okay to explore faith practices that have sustained you in different periods of your formation.
It is okay to be constantly evolving.
Just make sure to keep an open mind for the next step of the wild ride that God is sending you on. It never looks like anything you could have ever imagined.

The games in Rio are still in full swing. China dominates the medal count followed by Great Britain and Ukraine. Team USA currently ranks fourth. Just yesterday U.S. swimmers won three gold medals and smashed two world records.

Wait what? Ukraine in the top three of the medal count? Team USA only on four? Maybe we should take a closer look at our three gold medalists from yesterday:
Rebecca Meyers has Usher syndrome and has been deaf since she was born.
Bradley Snyder was blinded after stepping on an improvised explosive device while serving in the U.S. Navy in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
Michelle Konkoly woke up paralyzed from the waist down after she fell out of her dorm room window at Georgetown University.

By now you may have gathered that I am talking about the Paralympic Games. The first organized athletic day for disabled athletes that coincided with the Olympic Games took place on the day of the opening of the 1948 Summer Olympics in London, United Kingdom. Since 1960 the Paralympic Games have been a world class event in their own right.

Back to Rio: All these athletes perform at levels where regular Joes like me do not even have to think we could compare. What exactly do we mean when we classify them as “disabled”? Obviously they are more able to perform than I would be. So by performance standards I am more disabled. Is it the looks of an amputated leg, mannerisms, or just a random perception of normalcy? In most sports athletes are segregated by gender and / or weight. Why is “disability” a label that totally disqualifies you from the Olympics and puts you in a whole different event? The truth is: There is no normal. Everybody is different and everybody has his or her own level of ability.

You could rudely begin the story about yesterday’s gold medalists by saying, “A cripple, a blind, and a deaf jump into a pool.” Mainstream culture is so used to treating differently-abled people differently. Unfortunately there are stories where Jesus is used to reinforce a sense of “normal” versus “abnormal”. When Jesus heals the blind man in some Gospel stories he does so just because people pointed him in that direction. The blind man was comfortable in his life, had his daily routine down, had everything he needed. He never said we wanted to see. He never said he wanted to “be healed”. Why does Jesus impose his sense of normalcy on this poor man? Now he is totally on his own, will no longer receive the support he needs and has to start over in life. He is push into the position of a teenager even though he is a middle-aged man who had life figured out. Now he is truly disabled.

The Gospel authors want Jesus to heal everybody. But when they tell stories like that in effect they make Jesus commit the Sin of Ableism. Then he pretends there is a normal that everybody has to abide by, a standard of health, ability or aesthetics that you just have to match in order to be acceptable. Bekah Anderson warns to not use our Paralympic heroes for Inspiration Porn. Instead she advises to engage with persons beyond labels, “My challenge to the preachers, writers, and storytellers among us, including myself, is this: Stop telling stories for a moment, and listen. Listen, even though the voice speaking to you is slurred. Listen, even though the voice comes through an ASL interpreter or a computer. Listen, even when the voice has been effectively silenced, and honor that loss. Our voices and our silences are sacred. Pray with me that they may all one day find the sacred space they deserve.”

Mother Teresa has always been a saint, that is in the public opinion. Her selfless service to the least of these has inspired generations. The world officially granted her the status of a “civil saint” when she received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. It does not get better than that. In the truest, most literal church-sense of the word, as Protestants, we would have to say she received her saint status at Baptism. That was the day after she was born. She had not helped anyone then. Sainthood is not something we can earn but a gift from God. Saints are those called by God to be God’s people.

Imagine the world had no images of her with suffering little children. What remains of Mother Teresa, when you take away the millions of dollars raised over the course of her career? What if her wealthy father had not died when she was only eight years old? She may have stayed in her native Balkan region, never even making a trip to India. But he did, and she did, and that changed the world. Mother Teresa has been celebrated – maybe even venerated – by people of all faiths or no faith at all. She served as a perfect example of faith bearing fruit.

But then she also ran an international organization – Missionaries of Charity – with various clinics, hospitals and hospices. As of 2012 more than 4,500 nuns worked in 133 countries supporting 710 facilities. The moment you get involved in an organization of that size you lose the innocence of just gathering a handful of faithful around you. Every saint is always also a sinner. Mother Teresa is no different. There has been constant criticism of sanitary conditions and religious practices. Where two or three are gathered in Christ’s name they are bound to mess up. That is the risk you have to take whenever you do something significant or holy.

So last Sunday it happened that the Bishop of Rome agreed with the world and finally called Teresa a Saint, almost 20 years after her death. There is a lesson to be learned from that process: Do not wait to understand yourself as a saint. You are a saint right now. You can go out and do good right now. You do not need to wait for any authority’s approval or recognition. You may just gather a few people and do a one time project, or you may establish a world-wide network impacting millions. Whatever you do: Do not delay and do not wait for the approval of some perceived authority. You will mess up. You will be criticized. You will be a sinner. That is what being a saint is all about.