Monthly Archives: April 2011

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Friday Link Love

I am off today to chaperone a second-grade field trip to the American Museum of Natural History. (Can I just say that DC area kids are the luckiest kids in terms of field trips?)

A few links before I go:

Turn the Habit of Self-Criticism Upside-Down

When it’s time to write a resume or talk to a boss or discuss a project glitch with colleagues, the instinct is to spin, to avoid a little responsibility, to sit quietly. Put a best face forward, don’t set yourself up.

When reviewing just about anything you’ve done with yourself (in your head), the instinct is to be brutal, relentlessly critical and filled with doubt and self-blame.

What if they were reversed?

Top Ten Ways to Get Your Creative Juices Flowing

I liked “think inside the box.” Also, I stop mid-thought all the time and it’s amazingly useful for getting started the next day.

A Guide to Smartphone Manners

An excellent list. One sample:

Do not link all of your social media together. If I wanted to follow you on Foursquare, I would follow you on Foursquare. Finding out on Twitter that you are the mayor of the Boerum Hill IHOP doesn’t meet any current needs I have.

And just for fun and the ooh-ahh factor:
29 Stunning Examples of Tilt-Shift Photography

Just beautiful, arresting images.

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Design Your Own Preacher Camp

I leave on Sunday for my yearly meeting with a group of clergy that calls itself “The Well.” (The story of how we ended up with that name is a post in itself.)

We patterned ourselves after a group of hoity-toity pastors that have been meeting together for something like 25 years. I think there are other groups like ours too. This is our fourth year to meet, and here’s how it works:

We are each assigned two Sundays in the upcoming lectionary year, and for each of those Sundays, we are responsible for writing and presenting an exegetical paper. These papers analyze the text and typically provide 2-3 sermon “trajectories.” There are currently 15 people in our group, which means we leave with a head start on 30 weeks of preaching. From time to time we think about adding members, but haven’t figured out how to do so without cutting into evening free time, something we are not willing to do.

People have said to me, “Aww, I wish I had a group like that.” I always tell them, “Just do it!” It’s really not that complicated to put a group together. I would love to see these groups propagate. So to encourage people to give this a try, I thought I would write down a few things we did to get started or keep going. I think most of this is taken from the hoity-toity group, so no claims at originality.

1. Start with a core and invite. Our group began with a few seminary friends kicking around the idea of a yearly lectionary study group. Once this core group was locked in, each of us invited another person. If you still need more, have the invitee invite someone else. That casts the net wider. Decide what kind of denominational/regional/theological/seminary diversity you want, or don’t want.

2. Have a covenant. We were advised to set the expectation: if you don’t have your papers done, you don’t come. That sounds harsh, but the integrity of the group depends on everyone doing the work. We have granted exceptions for truly dire situations—in those cases, the folks brought one paper instead of two. Nobody has arrived empty handed.

3. Have a “dues guy.” We charge dues for basic operations of The Well—this is collected ahead of time by one of our members and kept in an account through the church he serves. Dues might pay for a few lunches, a dinner or two, evening snacks and drinks, etc. We use a sliding scale based on how big people’s continuing education budgets are, but it’s somewhere between $100-$200. Then each person is responsible for their travel expenses plus accommodations.

4. Divide the jobs and respect the royalty. We start with a short worship every morning, and someone new handles that each year. Another person draws names out of a hat to figure out who’s assigned to which date in the lectionary year. We make these determinations about 9 months ahead of time so people have time to write the papers (though I assure you, there is plenty of cramming going on as we speak). We also take turns “hosting” the event. That doesn’t mean it necessarily takes place in that person’s city, but one person is in charge of securing lodging (we like B&Bs), a place to meet (a local church, perhaps) and also moderates any discussion that needs to take place in between meetings (via e-mail). We’ve taken to calling that person the King or Queen, because they are “the decider” for that year. We have a lot of type A people in our group (if I ever write a book about our group it will be called “Too Many Alphas”) so it’s good to have someone in charge.

5. Use Dropbox. We’ve tried a number of things in terms of paper collection and distribution. We used to bring copies of our own papers for everyone, but lots of us preferred electronic copies for various technical and environmental reasons. This year we’re uploading our papers to Dropbox so people can download them onto their laptop and/or print them, if they’re a scribbling type. We make them due by Saturday morning before we leave, and if you miss the deadline, you are responsible for bringing copies of your own paper for everyone.

6. Schedule for the week: We do 40 minutes per paper. The person reads the text, reads the paper, and then the discussion begins. Someone watches the time so we stay on schedule. In the past, we’ve had a block of time with a scholar or pastor to talk shop, and this year we even have a free afternoon. Heaven.

7. Leave evenings free. I’ve heard that the hoity-toities do papers into the evening, and honestly, I don’t know how they do it—by the time we finish for the day, I’m fried. Guess that’s why they’re hoity-toity. Our group likes to have a leisurely dinner, then hang out late into the night. We also started a yearly competition, with a trophy awarded to the person with the most outrageous ministry story. And yes, there’s an actual trophy.

So, there it is. The Well is one of the best things I do as a clergy person and one of my happiest weeks of the year. And I say that despite the fact that I preach the lectionary less than half the time. The scripture study is awesome and stimulating, and of course, spending time with other people who “get it” and with whom you can be real is HUGE. I think I laugh more that week than I do the rest of the year.

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Pastors for the Next Church

This article has been making the rounds, questioning the utility of long expensive seminary educations as a means for training pastors:

Decentralized church systems with a history of less formal schooling historically outperform top-heavy ones with heavy academic requirements.

Meanwhile something like half of the churches in the Presbyterian Church (USA) are without pastors. Many cannot afford to pay one, especially not a full-time salary. All sorts of prognosticators say we’re moving back to the “tentmaker” model, in which the pastor has a paying job independent of the pastoral ministry. (The term goes back to the Apostle Paul.)

This is a multivalent issue and a complicated problem. (I disagree with the author’s argument about the reasons for mainline decline; it’s not lefty politics, it’s primarily demographics.) But one thing I haven’t heard anything about is a source for these “tentmakers”: stay-at-home mothers. So in addition to people who work full-time and have a part-time ministry gig, why not encourage “full-time mothers” to become part-time pastors? I live in an area that has quite a few stay-at-home moms, and I have met countless of them who have incredible gifts for ministry. They run VBS programs. They teach Bible studies. They could be trained and paid for doing what often amounts to a small part-time job.

I am a pastor who works part-time in a small congregation. I love the part-time schedule on its own merits. And I love it also because I parent three small children, and there is incredible flexibility to be home when they get off the bus, or to work from home when they’re sick, or to take a day and chaperone the school field trip (Friday, pray for me). It feels way more flexible than, say, teaching, which is another profession that many women find appealing because of its supposed family-friendliness.

Of course, the times it’s not flexible, it’s really not—crises, hospital visits, deaths. But with the right support system in place, it’s incredibly workable. The congregation I serve has been nothing but gracious when it comes to my kids, their schedules, and illnesses. Unfortunately, the predominant view of ministry as a profession is that it’s all-encompassing, and family life suffers. Stereotypes abound about PKs who grow up to resent the church. Those stereotypes are not without basis. But I’m telling you, I can think of hardly any profession that is as family friendly as ministry.

I think if the church could somehow harness the gifts of these women, it would be incredibly beneficial, both for churches and for the women themselves, who may feel like they want something of “their own” that’s not related to child-raising.

I’ve witnessed such a dejectedness when we think about our churches not being able to pay for full-time ministers. There’s a real sense of shame, like the church has failed. And I know that some people are called to ministry and want to work full-time and/or are the sole breadwinners in their families, and that has to be part of the equation too. But with this crisis comes an opportunity. I talk to more and more minister-moms who work full-time and would give anything to move to part-time. In many cases, their family can make it work economically; it’s just the church that needs to shift its attitude about what makes someone a “real” pastor.

Could denominations be creative in how we certify pastors? Could seminaries be creative in how we train them? I met recently with a woman who’s incredibly gifted, and is even considering seminary, but how does she do that with school-age children? Does she have to wait until her children are in college before she starts a cumbersome M.Div. program that could take three or more years? The church has need for her now.

What do you think?

Image: add a Bible to that mix and you’re set.

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Faith and Doubt—Where I Begin

A non-religious friend of mine read the sermon and said this, among other things:

Your approach made me feel it’s possible that religion can be open to the non-religious, which is a nice feeling—but it also leaves me wondering that if the central myth of Christianity being true or not is irrelevant to believers, what’s the difference between believers and nonbelievers?

Our conversation went all over the place from here, but this is what I said to him initially. I post it not because it’s all that polished or finished, but because it’s where I start with these kinds of conversations.

———–

There’s a book out right now called something like, “What’s the least I can believe and still be a Christian.” It attempts to strip out the more literalist stuff that is not really the core of the gospel. Do I have to believe Genesis 1 is scientific? No. Do I need to believe that Jesus somehow has a claim on my life and that impacts how I live? Yes.

Your basic question is right on. Perhaps there isn’t much difference between believers and non-believers. If Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of God/heaven is an enacted thing, you don’t need to profess Christ in order to be a part of it. And Jesus said as much (he who is not against us is for us—though he also said the opposite somewhere else, so whaddyagonnado).

What I hope to do in my preaching is to speak a word to people who are what Flannery O’Connor called  ”Christ-haunted”–who struggle with profound doubt (and really, what person with a brain doesn’t doubt?), but who just cannot quit Jesus. And the best I can come up with for those folks is this idea of master stories (not my own invention). What story are we living in? Might makes right, look out for #1, only the good die young? Or life out of death? So last Easter was the anniversary of King’s assassination. And I said [paraphrased] “it is crazy to think that a bullet could put an end to Dr. King’s dream.” That’s where I see resurrection.

And for people who aren’t inclined toward faith that’s ridiculous. The man died and his children were left without a father and there were riots in the streets. I can’t argue with that. But there were also redemptive elements in the aftermath too.

Roger Ebert’s review of Of Gods and Men (the movie I mentioned in the sermon) was interesting. He just could not get his head around the monks’ decision to stay and be killed. If they had left, he said, the group of them would have had a hundred years or so of service to give to the poor in some other community. I respect that view and also recognize it as the product of an atheist mind. I’m pretty utilitarian myself, but that calculated way of looking at their lives demonstrates a lack of understanding of what motivates them. Those monks are not primarily social service providers, they are participating in a story of Christ’s emptying himself for humanity, even unto death.

I don’t know if the faith thing is genetic or what, but it’s clear there are people who just aren’t oriented that way. I’m not sure there’s anything I could say to them and it’s probably insulting to try, so peace be upon them. But for people who perceive the world in a more intuitively faith-based way, I hope I give them a place to stand, or pace around scratching their heads, or whatever they need to do.

It’s not so much that the truth of the Christ myth is unimportant, but that the facticity of the physical resurrection is a red herring in that pursuit of truth. By living in the way of Jesus, we participate in the resurrection story, and that brings its own insight, even if that insight results in a further lack of clarity.

Like Augustine said, “It is solved by walking.”

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What do you say?

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Easter Opening

I wanted to share with my clergypals something we did yesterday in worship that I felt was simple but effective.

One of the tensions in the church is how much to emphasize the passion of Christ on Palm Sunday. It seems unfair to “cheat” Palm Sunday and insert too much Maundy Thursday/Good Friday into it, but attendance at those midweek services is usually a fraction of what it is on Sunday. So, many pastors reason, it makes sense to at least acknowledge the themes of MT/GF, otherwise most people don’t get them at all. And resurrection without a death is cheap grace. But what about starting Easter with Good Friday, and giving the Easter crowds a little taste of that theme? I’d personally never seen that done, but it makes sense.

At Tiny Church, we hit the Palm Sunday themes pretty hard two weekends ago—even sang “Joy to the World” after the sermon. We shifted to passion late in the service—really, just the last hymn. During “Go to Dark Gethsemane” we extinguished the candles, recessed out with the Bible, and draped a heavy black cloth on the communion table.

On Good Friday we did a Tenebrae service with seven candles on the communion table. These were all extinguished except for the one on the far right. It seemed right to have one remaining candle as the other lights dimmed or went out, and to have it off-center, since there is something off-kilter and out of balance about the death of Christ.

Sunday morning the black cloth was still there, and the off-center candle was lit again. The pulpit and chancel was mostly bare (although the lilies were there on the front wall because they have to be arranged ahead of time… what’re you gonna do?)

We adapted this call to worship from the book Before the Amen, which was perfect for our purposes:

Leader:            Look! The dawn is breaking. Morning is on its way.
See, on the hillside the sun is beginning to rise!
People:            Leave us alone and let us sleep. We doubt the good news; We see nothing but darkness.
Leader:            Look! The tomb is open. A new day has begun.
People:            Leave us alone and let us grieve. We have lost hope,
and all our dreams are dead.

Then we played the song “He Lives in You” from The Lion King musical. If you know the song, it starts low, with the word “Night,” but builds and builds until it ends in joyful adulation, with the words “He lives in you, he lives in me; he watches over everything we see” repeated throughout. From the moment I saw that show in Atlanta I thought “I will use that on Easter some day.” Only took 8 years…

So during the song I had people come forward and “bring Easter” into the sanctuary. First someone came up and took the candle off the table and used it to light the other candles in the chancel. Then I removed the black cloth with a nice swish at the first mention of “He lives in you.” The next section was a flurry of activity: white tablecloth on table, communion elements brought down the aisle, large bowl placed on the baptismal font, pouring of water with a big flourish, pulpit adorned with Easter parament, procession of Bible and placement in pulpit.

Then we picked up with the rest of the call to worship:

Leader:            But look! The grave is empty. The stone is rolled away. The Lord is risen!
People:            He is risen indeed!

The folks who participated are not dancers, including me. I’d always imagined some kind of liturgical dance to this song, but this was authentic for Tiny Church, and I think it worked well.

Sometimes, while I’m leading worship, Margaret likes to come up and stand quietly next to me. She doesn’t need acknowledgement, she just wants to be close. Yesterday she saw me coming down the aisle and came up beside me and took my hand. So she and I swished off the black cloth together. Then I had her bring in one of the loaves of bread. Very lovely… especially since Margaret likes to skip in the aisle. Yes, Easter is definitely a day for skipping.

BTW, if anyone ever does this, make sure you use the reprise, the one Rafiki sings, not the one Mustafa sings. He sings “They live in you.” Not as good for Easter… though maybe on Trinity Sunday.

I kid…

BTW, a friend of mine who heard I was going to do this decided to wake her teenage kids on Easter morning by playing this song. That makes me so happy to picture it.

He is risen indeed.

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They Did Not Understand—A Sermon for Easter

MaryAnn McKibben Dana
Idylwood Presbyterian Church
April 17, 2011
Easter
John 20:1-18

 

They Did Not Understand

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. 2So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.’ 3Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went towards the tomb. 4The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. 5He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. 6Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, 7and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. 8Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; 9for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. 10Then the disciples returned to their homes.

11 But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look* into the tomb; 12and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. 13They said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ She said to them, ‘They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.’ 14When she had said this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. 15Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?’ Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.’ 16Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew,* ‘Rabbouni!’ (which means Teacher). 17Jesus said to her, ‘Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” ’ 18Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

It’s happened again, like clockwork. Every year around this time there’s an article in which someone breathlessly announces some piece of Jesus-related archaeology. This year? Someone has found a pair of nails that could have been those used to nail Jesus to the cross. (It’s always amazing to me how these discoveries coincide with Easter.)

These artifacts always get used as evidence by all sorts of people to lend credence to their own points of view. “You see, this all really happened and we’ve got doodads to prove it!” some people crow triumphantly. Others sneer, “You faith people really grasp at straws. Even if the nails were used to nail Jesus to the cross, that doesn’t make him the Son of God and it certainly doesn’t mean he rose from the dead.”

At the heart of all of those statements and arguments and what’s at the heart of our even being here today is one simple question… one profound question:

Is it true?

Is it true that the body was not just stolen by grave robbers, but risen from the dead?

Is it true that the pile of linen wrappings and the cloth rolled up like a beach towel were signs that Jesus was alive?

Is it true that the man whom Mary saw in the garden with dirt under his fingernails and a smudge on his face was not the gardener, but the resurrected Christ?

Is it true? they asked on that first Easter. Is it true? we ask, 2000 years later.

We ask with the skepticism of our age: Is it true? Do people really still believe this? Can’t this holiday just be a nice cultural festival to celebrate spring? Nobody takes resurrection seriously anymore.

Or we ask with our radar attuned to the hypocrisy we see on the part of seemingly pious people: Is it true? Because the people who call themselves Christians sure don’t act like it’s true… what with their judging and hating gays and scapegoating immigrants and committing the very same sins they condemn in others.

Or we ask with all the desperation and hope we can muster, because we have loved ones struggling for life, we have despair over the state of our planet, we feel beaten down by the suffering that seems to flow to the ends of the earth: Is it true? Is death really not the end? Does the fate of this tiny planet in a remote corner of the Milky Way really matter? Is our history and our civilization heading somewhere?

…Today may be Easter but it sure looks a lot like Good Friday out there.

* * *

Mary arrives at the tomb, spices in hand, ready to anoint a dead body. She’d waited, you see, during the Jewish Sabbath (and the Passover, no less) until she could prepare the body. She went with haste, while it was still early morning, not because she expected “it” to be true, not because she knew this was the first day of a new creation, but because she had a job to do. For all she knows, it’s still Good Friday.

Mary is the first one there, and she’s the first one to see the resurrected Christ and to touch him, and to be spoken to by him. But she’s not the first person to believe the resurrection; she’s not the first to realize what has happened. That happens earlier in the story, and someone else gets that honor. Someone else “believes” the resurrection, there in verse 8, before Jesus even shows up to Mary in the garden… but we don’t know his name.

Peter runs to the tomb with a person John calls “the other disciple,” who gets there first. And this disciple does not stand at the tomb’s entrance and peer in. He does not squint into the gloom, refusing to cross that threshold. No, he goes into the tomb. And then, and only then, does he see and believe. He goes into a place of death and finds life instead.

And here’s the comforting thing, for me anyway: (verse 9) This other disciple believes, even though he has not understood the scripture up to now. Think of it. The very first person to believe in the risen Christ didn’t see the signs at all. The first believer was confused about who Jesus was and what he was all about. He didn’t get it.

When he saw Jesus turn water into wine, he didn’t get it.

When he heard Jesus proclaim a message of love and forgiveness, he didn’t get it.

When he saw Jesus break a couple loaves of bread and bless a basket of fish and feed 5,000 people, he didn’t get it.

When he heard Jesus thunder “Lazarus, come out of that tomb!” he didn’t get it.

I’m thinking that if Jesus’ disciple and constant companion believed in the resurrection without understanding the whole thing, maybe it’s OK for us not to understand it.

So let me say to you today: I don’t get it.

But if the resurrection is something we crave, if new life is something that we want to stake our life on, if a reborn creation is the master story in which we dare to live and move and have our being… we can’t just stand at the door of the tomb and analyze things. We can’t perch our glasses on our nose and survey the scene. We’ve gotta enter in. We’ve gotta bend down, get close to it, we’ve gotta see it first hand. We’ve got to enter the tomb in order to see and believe. We’ve got to be that unnamed disciple. Someone asked me this week, “Do we not know who that guy was?” Do we not know who the unnamed disciple was who believed but did not understand?

I say, we know that disciple’s name.

The disciple’s name is MaryAnn.

The disciple’s name is David.

The disciple’s name is Emily… Myrtle… Steve… Bruce.

The disciple saw and believed, but did not understand.

* * *

The disciples’ names are Luc, Christophe, Christian, Jean-Pierre, Paul. They were Trappist monks, originally from France, living in Algeria during the 1990s. Their story is the subject of a new movie called Of Gods and Men.

These monks live peacefully among the Muslim villagers, they run a clinic, they attend coming of age festivals for the children, they study the Koran as well as the Bible, they worship Christ and love one another as family. A group of Islamists, extremists, begin to terrorize the village. They systematically and brutally begin to murder all foreigners. The Muslims in the village recognize this as an utter corruption of Islam, and they are frightened. And so are the monks.

They have a choice to make: do they leave the village and return to France? Or do they stay with the people of the village, whom they love? Do they leave and go to a safer place to serve another community for the remaining years of their lives? Or do they remain committed to be the body of Christ among and with their Muslim neighbors, knowing that that commitment could lead to their deaths?

Most of the movie centers around the process of making that decision. At one point Christian tries to explain what their Trappist community is all about and he says [paraphrased], We are called to love our neighbors. We can’t do that from a distance. We are called to be intimately involved with their lives. Close to them, their joy and their pain.

We are called to be close to them.

We are called to enter into the tomb, not stand at arms’ length. We are called to enter into places of suffering, places of pain, places of mystery and darkness and perplexity. Because that’s what Jesus did. In his death he crawled inside every agony we can imagine and proclaimed that those agonies are not the end. He emerged on the other side, looking something like the gardener, disheveled, but ready to plant and cultivate a new heaven and a new earth with those willing to pick up the shovel and the plow alongside him.

As I watched the film I was stunned at the monks’ commitment to the way of Christ, especially since I knew how their story ended. I felt convicted by their faith, even as I felt grateful that I will probably never have to make such a stark choice.

But maybe the lessons of the film are not so divorced from our own experience. Because while they are wrestling with this decision, they are chopping firewood. They are putting honey into jars and selling it in the marketplace. They are digging through a box of donated shoes to find just the right size for a little girl and her mother. They are rejoicing at another shipment of medicine that comes in. They are celebrating with friends. They are washing dishes. They are singing and they are keeping silent. They are drinking wine and eating. They are doing ordinary things… ordinary things with great love. They are in the tomb, completely immersed in human experience and human suffering and human mystery and joy… not peering in from a safe distance.

So maybe while we are asking, Is it true? we might try some things.

We might try looking the person in the eye who’s holding the cardboard sign or the battered paper cup half-full of loose change.

We might put away the smartphone when our loved one is talking to us and hear what they’re saying and maybe even the message behind the words.

We might write a letter or make a phone call; we might make our voice heard in the halls of power to speak up for justice and peace for all people.

We might plant a tree that we will never see fully mature.

And we might tend to this moment as if it is the most precious thing in God’s kingdom.

We might go about our work, or our relationships, with the same great love as those monks, working to partner with God in this reborn earth that we seek to believe in even as we fail to fully understand it.

Is it true?

How does the life we live answer that question?

What do you, the unnamed disciple, say?

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Friday Link: Good Friday/Earth Day Edition

Whether you’re a pastor feeling the crush of preparations for Clergy Superbowl, or thinking about this fragile planet we live on and our need to protect it, or experiencing something else entirely, here’s a link that will put things into perspective.

Scale of the Universe

Use the slider bar to see where we fit into the scheme of things.

What are we, that Thou art mindful of us?

Breathe. Enjoy.

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Why Guilt and Duty Matter

Donald Miller has an interesting post today about why we do what we do. Excerpt:

I did an interview today and was asked about how I make decisions regarding helping others. I told the interviewer if I encounter somebody in need but don’t feel like helping them, I usually don’t. It sounds terrible, doesn’t it? But I explained the reason I don’t is because there are plenty of people I actually do feel like helping. And each of us only has so much time and so many resources, so I can’t choose both.

If I help the people I want to help, I’ll actually follow through, they will sense my sincerity, and the whole experience will be more enjoyable for both of us.

Not only this, but if I help the other person out of a sense of duty, I’m not so much helping them as I’m trying to get rid of my negative feelings of guilt or responsibility. My reasons are marginally selfish: I WANT TO STOP FEELING GUILTY.

Are there times when we should do something because we feel guilty? Sure. But I don’t think there are as many as we think. I don’t want to be driven by guilt, I want to be driven by love.

I agree and I don’t. I read recently (and may have blogged it) that guilt is not a good motivator for behavior. (I remember in the movie Hotel Rwanda, Paul Rusesabagina says, “We will shame the West into helping us,” and I thought sadly, That’s not going to work… for one thing, it assumes we have any sense of shame to begin with.)

And I do think that with so many problems in the world, and so many issues vying for our attention, I think some discernment of gifts is essential. I think Buechner’s axiom is as good as any: to find the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s great need.

That said, Miller’s post reminded me of this bit from Office Space:

Peter Gibbons: Our high school guidance counselor used to ask us what you’d do if you had a million dollars and you didn’t have to work. And invariably what you’d say was supposed to be your career. So, if you wanted to fix old cars then you’re supposed to be an auto mechanic.
Samir: So what did you say?
Peter Gibbons: I never had an answer. I guess that’s why I’m working at Initech.
Michael Bolton: No, you’re working at Initech because that question is bullshit to begin with. If everyone listened to her, there’d be no janitors, because no one would clean shit up if they had a million dollars.

Having a personal sense of satisfaction is important, but I’m not sure the answer is to listen less to our sense of guilt and duty. Perhaps we need to listen more, or listen more faithfully.

Personally, I think guilt has gotten a bad rap. The problem is we go to extremes with it. On one extreme, we experience a guilt that morphs into a crippling sense of shame, a feeling of worthlessness that manifests itself as inaction. On the other extreme, we dismiss the role of guilt altogether. One of Miller’s criteria for serving “for the fun of it and the love of it” is:

I normally try to serve people I like and respect. This makes serving easy because you just get to hang out and partner with good people. Helping people you like and respect makes helping fun.

I think this is dangerous. And I don’t think it’s biblical, for those who care about that sort of thing.

Guilt is an emotion like any other; it is morally neutral. It’s what you do with it that matters. If I ignore a homeless person on the street, I hope I feel guilty about that. Not so that I will flog myself for being a terrible person. Rather, the guilt is an important message that I need to hear: I am somehow responsible for that person. Not just when it feels good, or when I know the best way to help him or her. I am my brother and sister’s keeper. I tell parishioners this all the time when they ask me whether they did the right thing by helping someone (or not helping someone they suspected was a con artist). I can’t tell you that, because I don’t know, I say. And then they counter, But I feel very unsettled and uncomfortable about it.

Good, I usually respond.

Later in the post Miller says:

If you asked your dad why he sacrifices so much for you, which answer would be more affirming, an answer in which he stated it was his duty as a father, or an answer in which he just said “because I love you.” Which answer seems more selfless?

I agree that the love answer is more affirming. But I don’t think that acting out of love makes one more selfless. In fact, I think he creates a false dichotomy between love and duty. Duty is an outgrowth of love. What is love without a sense of duty? Warm, empty feelings.

All those nights I woke up to nurse an infant, when I was so tearfully, fretfully tired that I would have given large sums of money to have someone else do it for me, I did so because I had a responsibility to that child. And I had a responsibility to my child because I love her. They are the same thing.

One of the favorite shows in our family is “Dirty Jobs.” Mike Rowe is the host, and he travels the country visiting people who do, well, dirty jobs: leech wranglers, spider-venom collectors, roadkill cleaners, etc. He learns their jobs and usually does the work right alongside them.

Mike Rowe has spoken about the traditional advice we receive in determining our career and has called it hooey:

“When I left high school–confused and unsure of everything–my guidance counselor assured me that it would all work out, if I could just muster the courage to follow my dreams. My Scoutmaster said to trust my gut. And my pastor advised me to listen to my heart.”

“If I’ve learned anything from this show, it’s the folly of looking for a job that completely satisfies a ‘true purpose.’ In fact, the happiest people I’ve met over the last few years have not followed their passion at all—they have instead brought it with them.”

I say Amen.

What do you say?

by

The Pastor Leaves a Voice Mail

I took the weekend off from National Poetry Month, but here’s a quick one.

You want to talk to the person. It’s why you called,
to wade into their sorrow, gripping your tether.

But the poignant moment is when you call
and hear their voice,
their recorded voice, their before-voice,
before their dear one slumped to the floor,
before the doctor gave that head-tilt look.

It breaks your heart, they are so cheerful,
reciting that banal modern liturgy
on an unassuming Thursday.