“For the word of the Lord has become for me a reproach and derision all day long. If I say, ‘I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,’ then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.
—Jeremiah 20: 8b-9 Continue reading
But Moses said to Joshua, “Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the LORD would put his spirit on them!” —Numbers 11:29
The people of God have always wrestled with the question of where God’s Spirit is at work. In Numbers 11 we hear a strange story that raises this very question.
Moses had gathered seventy of the elders around the tent of meeting. God took some of the spirit from Moses, and put it on these seventy and they prophesied. But there were two men, Eldad and Medad, who missed the memo and remained in the camp. Still, the spirit came upon them and they prophesied in the camp. Continue reading
“So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up.” —Galatians 6: 9
My mother-in-law is 86. Every day she engages in some form of political protest, such as contacting her representatives by phone or writing them a letter. This is part of her personal faith discipline. Continue reading
“For he delivers the needy when they call, the poor and those who have no helper.”
—Psalm 72: 12
Psalm 72 begins “Give the king your justice, O God.” It implies that justice is a God-given matter, and though in our time we have no king, the seeking of justice remains one of the marks of authentic government. Continue reading
“Hilkiah (the high priest) and those the king had sent with him went to speak to the prophet Huldah, who was the wife of Shallum son of Tokhath, the son of Hasrah, keeper of the wardrobe.” —2 Chronicles 34:22
The prophet Hulda gets a scant 9 lines in the Bible, and in them we learn more about her husband than we do about her.
Nonetheless, she must have been impressive, for when King Josiah needed a prophet to authenticate the Word of God, it was to Hulda that he turned. Continue reading
Rubem Alves, the Brazilian writer and theologian, died last week at the age of 80. I had the privilege to get to know him during one of his visits to the United States in the early 1980’s. He came to Bangor Theological Seminary in Bangor, Maine, where I was the chaplain at the time. One of my unofficial duties was showing hospitality to visiting scholars, and so over the course of a week or so, I shared several meals with him and drove him around town to see the sights. I remember I took him shopping for his family at T. J. Maxx. He had a shopping list from his wife, and was very methodical about what to bring home to Brazil.
He was one of the most intellectually curious people I have ever met. A professor of philosophy, he was interested in literature, music (he wrote eloquently about Vivaldi), education and psychoanalysis (in which he was trained.) He was such great company, full of ideas and ready to discuss a world of topics. He had a wonderful sense of humor and a great laugh
He loved poetry and his 2002 book, The Poet, the Warrior, the Prophet (SCM Classics) is an important work in the field of theopoetics. He went on to publish over 40 books on a wide variety of subjects. A popular lecturer and speaker he was also a columnist for his local newspaper.
He is often credited as one of the founders of liberation theology and his dissertation at Princeton Theological Seminary was later published under the title A Theology of Human Hope (Corpus Books, 1969) with a foreword by Harvey Cox. It was an important early work in English on the subject.
I just learned of his death from a tweet from the World Council of Churches, memorializing his many contributions to the ecumenical movement. The remembrance of him from the WCC can be found here.
I recall him with great affection and give thanks to God for him.
Here is a quote of his:
“Let us plant dates even though those who plant them will never eat them. We must live by the love of what we will never see. . . . Such disciplined love is what has given prophets, revolutionaries, and saints the courage to die for the future they envisaged. They make their own bodies the seed of their highest hope.” (From There is A Season by Joan Chittister)
My dear friend and colleague Willis Elliott has died. Scott Paeth’s FB post today captures some of the essence of Willis:
“For those who did not know him, he was the often-insightful/often-infuriating gadfly of the United Church of Christ, and a long-time participant in the Confessing Christ group. He died old and full of years”
I met Willis at the very first Craigville Colloquy back in 1984. He spoke at dinner about the “Christian Connection,” the often overlooked piece of the four-church merger that became the United Church of Christ. I thought, “Who is this guy?” Smart, articulate, funny, and insightful. He had a full white beard like Santa Claus, and I thought he was really old, but that was thirty years ago so what did I know?
Later we had him at my congregation as a speaker and with his wife Loree a guest in our home. He was a brilliant, multi-lingual polymath, a former fundamentalist, and at times as difficult and uncompromising as Jeremiah. If there had been a shop that sold iron yokes, Willis might have purchased one. But he could also be an encouraging mentor. Years ago I did a presentation at the MA Conference annual meeting and afterward he made a point to come up and thank me. He also said, “I didn’t know you had it in you!” That was Willis.
In the 1990’s he was one of the founders of Confessing Christ in the United Church of Christ, along with Gabe Fackre, Fred Trost, Jim Gorman, Leslie Zeigler, Barbara Clemons, Bennie Whiten, Herb Davis, Andy Lang, Ted Trost, myself and many others. “Confessing Christ” was an invitation to “joyous theological reflection and serious theological work” on behalf of the ministry and mission of the United Church of Christ.
For years we had our Confessing Christ annual meeting at the church I was serving in Pittsfield, MA, and I got to know Willis well. He was one of the least compromising people I have ever known, and the least career oriented. He had been the librarian and Old Testament Professor at New York Theological Seminary, and before that had served on the national staff of the UCC.
He was a deeply committed Christian, reading the Bible every day in the original languages. His “Think-Sheets,” free of an editorial hand, were challenging, quirky, often brilliant, and, just as often, maddening. They always made you think.
In his latter years his eyesight waned, but he kept up a lively correspondence and participation on the Confessing Christ list-serve conversation.
The “thickness” of the conversation in the United Church of Christ, and the great church, will now be poorer for the loss of his voice, but he had no doubt, and neither do I, that he is now numbered among the great cloud of witnesses. I thank God for him.
(Last month I was visiting my son in Washington, D.C., and I revisited the Lincoln Memorial where Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream Speech.” I also visited the Martin Luther King Memorial for the first time. It was dedicated in 2011, and this was my first time in Washington since then. I was deeply moved by both monuments, and struck by how much of Dr. King’s Dream, especially around economic justice, is still unfulfilled. People often forget that he was not only a tireless worker for civil rights, but also for peace, and the rights of workers and the poor.
This prayer of invocation is from our local Martin Luther King Service from a decade ago.)
“Lord God, we give you thanks for the blessings you have so generously lavished upon us, for all the ways you provide for our life with both daily bread and spiritual nourishment. It may be cold outside, but let us be warm in here, warmed by the presence of this congregation, warmed by the memory of Martin Luther King, and warmed by the power of your Holy Spirit, whose fire kindles our courage, and makes us bold for your kingdom and its righteousness.
Forgive us those times and places when we have let you down, when we have not answered to the better angels of our nature, when we have danced to the world’s tune and listened to the seductive voices of the powerful and privileged as if their voice was your voice, and worshiped the manifold idols of our own imaginations. Turn us again to you and your righteousness. Keep us from the temptations of an easy virtue and a pious complacency. Remind us that the commitments to righteousness, justice and peace for which Dr. King lived and died are still not accomplished.
So be about us and within us and among us this afternoon as we worship you and remember your servant Martin. Be especially with our preachers and speakers and singers and musicians. And let this time together be precious time, let it be your time, that we may catch a glimpse of your new heaven and new earth, when all the deferred dreams of many generations will be finally fulfilled, when all, from the least to the greatest, will see you and know you, when war will be no more, and prejudice and oppression shall cease, and none shall be afraid. Amen”
(Dr. Floyd’s invocation from the Martin Luther King Memorial service at Second Congregational Church (UCC), Pittsfield, Massachusetts on January 19, 2003)
Too many of our new pastors in the mainline church leave the ministry after a few years. There are many reasons why this happens, but for whatever reason, it is not good. It’s bad for them and bad for the church, and it is bad stewardship to train someone who only serves a short time.
Some of these ministers should never have been ordained in the first place, and the gatekeepers didn’t do their due diligence. Some were lacking the necessary “gifts and graces” for ordained ministry, which doesn’t mean they didn’t have a different and effective ministry in the church.
There are far too many sad situations where a ministry fails for one reason or another, where hopes are shattered, and a young (or not so young) person is saddled with a financially crippling debt for the years in seminary they paid for in loans.
Being a pastor of a church is a hard job. I was one for thirty years. Despite the nonsense being promulgated by the “experts,” faithful pastoring is not a matter of working a certain number of hours (or “units” as they are now sometimes called.) It’s a vocation that takes up most of your waking hours,
When a congregant really needs you, it doesn’t matter whether it is your day off. If you asked me how many seasoned pastors are burned out to one degree or another, I would say, “All of them, if they are really doing their job.” That is why pastors need to exercise radical self-care, pray constantly, and accept the fact, that not being yourself God, you cannot do all that is demanded of you.
Now I readily admit that there is some truth to the whole boundary/take care of yourself/take time for yourself movement. But like all partial truths it is not the whole truth. The church once had a useful word, now much out of favor, for when one piece of the truth gets blown out of proportion. The word is heresy
One of the modern heresies (but by no means the only one) of the contemporary mainline church, is that you can have something akin to a normal 40 hour a week professional life and be a faithful pastor. It isn’t true. A pastor’s life, and the life of the pastor’s family is necessarily involved in the community of their congregation in season and out of season.
Sometimes, even often, it is wonderful; other times it isn’t. That’s the way it goes. It isn’t the Canyon Ranch spa. I often say being a pastor is the best vocation there is, but perhaps the worst job. If you are not called to it, it is something you really don’t want to do
When I started as a pastor thirty-five years ago I was well trained and well educated and didn’t have a clue what I was really supposed to do. I learned quickly. One of the things I learned was that you have to love your congregants, even the unlovable, of which there are far too many, and who take up a good deal of your time. If and when you find yourself loving them, you know you are on your way to really being a pastor. Some of them you will just never learn to love, and you have to turn them over to God, who does.
I had been a anti-war and civil rights activist in college and seminary, and had gone to jail for my causes, but when I got into the pastorate I learned very quickly that you can’t be a prophet until you have earned the peoples’ trust. This means years of marrying and burying and sitting by sick beds and in hospital rooms. If you do this well they may be ready to hear hard truths from the pulpit. They may not. Certainly Isaiah’s prophecies fell on deaf ears.
New ministers who have grown up in the church have a leg up, because they know its rhythms and customs,its “grandeur and misery.”
But today many of our ministerial candidates haven’t grown up in the church. Some of them turn out to be our best ones, but they are at a disadvantage. They don’t know the church’s music and it’s well-worn liturgies. They don’t know the joys of a community strawberry festival on a warm spring day, or the energy and agony of a capital-funds campaign to get a new boiler.
They often come to seminary or divinity school in a process of self-discovery, which is fine. Most of us did that to one degree or another. I recall from seminary that the ones who knew they wanted to be a minster since the age of six were best avoided, and probably needed therapy.
Now seminary is a good place to learn many useful things, like that David didn’t write all (or perhaps any) of the Psalms, that the Scriptures are thick and have a literary history, and that the heresies we see around us are as old as the church. If one is lucky, you’ll find a mentor or two, and be able to intern in a healthy church who will love you and teach you what it means to be the church.</div
What seminaries are not good at (because its not really their job) is forming men and women into Christians, much less teach them how to be faithful pastors. Christian formation is primarily the church's job, not the schools, although they can help out.
There are many fine teachers and students in these schools, and I don’t want in any way to impugn their integrity or their faith.
At the same time, we are seeing too many newly-minted pastors who come to seminary, not only to find themselves, but with a passion for a social cause or causes, which is fine. I certainly had mine. In seminary the flame of their passion is often fanned by others who share it, which is also fine.
But if all you know of the faith is what you learn in divinity school you are at a distinct dis-advatantage. And if the main reason you accept a call from a congregation is to promote your passion and cause then your soul is in danger, and so is the life of a congregation. Because the congregation you go to may or may not share your passions. It can be dangerous either way.
If they agree with most of your views, be they liberal or conservative, the temptation is to self-justification and self-righteousness, and a tendency to see sin and evil as “out there” in your ideological adversaries, and not also in your own heart and soul. Then the great insight expressed by the Reformers' axiom simul justus et peccator, that we are at the same time justified and sinners, is lost. This danger in the mainline church can exist in some ministers for their entire careers and they will never even know it.
The other temptation is perhaps more dangerous, at least in mainline churches. That is to go to your first congregation where they don’t share your passion for your social cause or causes, and you scold them for it. You do not learn to love them, and they do not learn to love you, and eventually your ministry fails.
Typically we are too polite to ever actually fire anyone (although it does happen), but there are other ways to get you to leave, the best one being to so discourage you that you lose heart and leave. Some, too many, of our new pastors actually seek out this kind of martyrdom, and when they are inevitably cast out, they can then turn and say how stiff-necked and hard-hearted their congregation was. But my sympathy for them is limited. Congregations can be stiff-necked and hard-hearted and even abusive. This is nothing new. Just go read Exodus or First Corinthians.
But congregations can be also be wonderful, supportive, gracious, and long-suffering, especially if they sense you are really trying to be their faithful pastor.
The late great Bill Coffin, a prophet himself, once told a bunch of us young ministers (about 1972) a story (which my version here will be only a loose approximation) about one of his students from Yale.
The young pastor was in hot water for his deeply prophetic views and fiery pulpit pronouncements on social issues (it was Vietnam time, and the nation was deeply divided.) The lay leaders wanted to fire him. As the discussion heated up, one of them, a banker, prominent member and very conservative, stood up and said, “You can’t fire him, he’s our pastor. It’s true that he’s a real pinko, and I can’t stand most of the stuff he says from the pulpit, but when my wife was dying he came to see her every day. He’s staying.” And he did. Bill went on to say that if you are a faithful pastor, your flock will give you great freedom to pursue your passions, be it peace and justice work, or collecting butterflies.
A dear rabbi friend of mine who is well up in his eighties told a bunch of us a powerful story last week. He had been an army chaplain in the Korean War, and, perhaps because of that, he was a firm supporter of the Vietnam War. But when our National Guard opened fire and killed some students who were peacefully protesting the war at Kent State University in 1970, he had a change of heart, and he changed his mind. And on the next High Holy Days in the fall, when he preached to the biggest congregation of the year, he apologized to them and asked them to forgive him, admitting that he had been wrong about the war. This story brought brought tears to my eyes. He had been their faithful rabbi by then for fifteen years, and he stayed for another dozen or so. The Vietnam War by 1970 was very unpopular, especially here in what until last December was sometimes called by conservatives “The Peoples Republic of Massachusetts.” I am sure that many of his congregants had been hearing sermons they didn’t agree with for some time. But he had earned the right. And when he finally repented publicly, he was indeed a prophet with the full attention of his people. From then on, when he spoke out against the war, he had every ear.
So at the right time and place you can sometimes be both a prophet and a pastor. But you’d better be a pastor to the people first, because that is your primary calling. If you just want to be a prophet, I suggest you go work for a political action organization.
(Addendum: Since yesterday several of my interlocutors have reminded me that the prophetic office is one of the roles of the whole congregation, and I heartily agree. One of the roles of the pastor is to equip the saints for that office (along with their priestly and royal ones) as the body of Christ. What I was addressing was the lone clerical prophet, a romantic notion that is now in vogue. If the preacher is faithful there will be all kinds of political implications in the Word broken open for the people. But our pulpits are too often merely a platform for an overtly political agenda, and the texts then just become window dressing. But you can’t say it all in one post, although I often try.)
When I Survey . . . 