Remember for my good

This is the time of year that Methodist churches are forming budgets and personnel committees are making decisions about the salaries of pastors.  In our system, conventional wisdom among pastors has often been to think of career advancement in terms of salary.  What I mean is this: Measuring success in ministry is very difficult, and yet we all want a sense of knowing how we're coming along in life.  Church membership, attendance, activity, etc. are ways to measure, but they are not concrete measures.  Salaries feel to preachers to be apples-to-apples measure of how they compare with their peers.  Also, bishops and district superintendents use salaries as a primary guide for appointing pastors.  Some cabinets use salaries as the primary guide, an almost exclusive measure, even above compatibility between clergy and congregation.

I was reading today in Nehemiah 5, and stumbled upon Nehemiah's reflections on his pay for the work of repairing the walls around Jerusalem.  He mentioned that former governors of Jerusalem used taxation upon the people and "laid a heavy burdens upon the people," so that they might have "food and wine."  Nehemiah refuses to follow the example of predecessors who used the people to make a more comfortable life for themselves, "because of the fear of the Lord."  Nehemiah's internal rationale when it came to his support was that God's opinion of his actions in regard to what salary he took for his work was all that mattered--not the opinion of his peers, his spouse, or his own sense of success related to his pay.  I dare say that clergy would raise their support differently if the only thing that mattered in conversations about compensation was God's judgement on their motives and means.

Nehemiah also says that he did not take from the people a food allowance that the empire gave him rights to take, and yet he saw to it that the workers in his administrative apparatus were properly fed.  He says that he always remembered that the people and servants were "gathered there for the work."  He had no problem raising support from the people and he calls the labor and resources for the project a burden.  But he is unwilling to add to their burden for the sake of his comfort.  Pastors would do well to follow Nehemiah's example and to make sure that their only concern is the mission of the church and the support of staff and lay leadership.  Pastors are certainly supposed to call the people to sacrificial giving and service.  But their giving and service must be dedicated only to the mission of the church to proclaim the Gospel and share the love of Christ, never to make a more comfortable life or a more successful ministerial career for themselves.

Lastly, Nehemiah trusts that the Lord, not the people, and not the empire that appointed him, will be the one to reward him.  Nehemiah expects a reward.  "Remember for my good, O my God, all that I have done for this people."  Do we all want God to remember, or do we have some things we wish God would forget?

As pastors make decisions about their giving and receiving, we would do well to follow Nehemiah's example.  God sees the heart and he sees all of our choices in the motivations by which we act and the words which we use to achieve our ends.  We, like Nehemiah, would do well to live as if only God was the rewarder of our work, and that only God would be the one to judge what we have given and what we have received from his people.

Pastoral Prayer for stewardship (presence) based on Philippians 2:1-11, 19-30

Holy God:

We thank you each week for the opportunity to gather in your house and to be with your people.  We thank you that your presence is with us and that your spirit flows to us through each other.  

Especially in this time when we reflect on our commitment to our church family and our call to support its ministries, we are grateful for all that it means to have a family in Christ and to know that we are not alone in our Christian journey.  We are thankful for a people who help us to raise our children to know you, who stand by us and comfort us in the challenges of life, who grieve with us when we grieve.  We thank you for a people who have shared life with us, who know our story, people with whom we have a history.   We are thankful for friends in Christ with whom we can laugh.  We are thankful for fellow soldiers in your army of redeeming love, who lock arms with us in our collective mission to reach our community and world with the grace of Jesus Christ.

We take these things for granted.  We take each other for granted.  So forgive us when we wander, when we lose our heart for your house and your people.  

Teach us to give of ourselves to one another--to fulfill your command to love one another.  Make this body of believers and living community of grace and redemption, a people who bind up each other’s wounds and teach each other by their example how to follow Christ.  Teach us to truly be a body.  And may your body rise up to fulfill your mission.

Amen. 

Pastoral Prayer based on Luke 15:1-10 (the Parable of the Lost Sheep)

Holy God:

We give you thanks and praise for the beauty of this day and for all the promise it offers.  We thank you for life, for joy, for every opportunity to walk with you as children of the light.

An old hymn has the line, “prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.”  We all, like sheep, have gone astray.  We are all prone to wander.  We have times when our hearts are completely wrapped up in your heart and we can’t imagine that we would ever stray.  And then, one day, we wake up and wonder if we even know how to pray.  We feel as if we are merely going through the motions.  We may look just the same on the outside, but inside, we are like the Prodigal Son, lost in a far off country.

As easily as we wander, we quickly judge others when they wander.  We want everyone else to be held to high standards.  We get tired of always doing your business of drawing back the wanderers to your fold.  We want people to take responsibility and do right without having to be helped all the time.  When they wander, we often act as if they should do some penance before they are fully celebrated in the family.  

Cleanse our hearts and give us a new view of your heart.  Give us a heart like the shepherd who left the ninety-nine to go looking for the sheep, whose heart was full of joy when he found it, who celebrated and put the lost sheep on his shoulders because he was so happy to have found it.  Give us a heart like the father of the prodigal son, who threw a party when his son returned because he had been lost and now was found, dead and now alive.  Help us to find our greatest joy in the finding of the lost.  Help us to remember, and perhaps to know for the first time, the joy that comes from being lost and then being found by your love and grace.

Amen.

Pastoral Prayer for 1 Sept 2013 (based on Luke 14:7-24--the Parable of the Banquet)

Holy God:

We gather today to give you praise.  Many things have taken our attention this week.  Many things have been the object of our praise and adoration.  Many things have captured our imagination and inspired our passion.  Today, we gather to remember that nothing truly matters in the light of your glory.  Everything else will pass away, but only you, your love, and your eternal Kingdom will last forever.

We have spent our lives trying to move forward, trying to move up.  From time to time we have pushed others out of the way.  We have climbed over others, excluded others, and made others feel small.  We have been hurt and angry when others have treated us with less than respect or have made us feel like outsiders.

Today, we remember your Son, who took flesh and walked among us.  We remember that he took his place with the least, the last, and the lost.  We remember that he made himself a criminal, an ethnic minority, a person in poverty, a person under political domination.  We remember that he was despised and rejected by men, and object of scorn and ridicule.

We look forward to a day when he will throw a banquet for his people, where he will be the host and each and every one of us will be the guest of honor.  In the meantime, teach us to place ourselves where he chose to place himself--in the last place.  In the place of dishonor.  And so, may we find him there.  And may he make a new world through us in which there are no places of dishonor and where everyone has a place at the table, a world that begins to look a little more like the marriage supper of the lamb.

Amen.

Pastoral Prayer for 18 Aug 2013 (based on Luke 12:49-56: "I came to bring fire; Do you think I came to bring peace? I came to bring division; etc.")

Holy God:

We thank you for this day, a day full of promise and a day full of beauty.  We thank you for nourishing the earth with the rains, for nourishing our bodies with the bounty of the earth, for nourishing our hearts with your love and the love of family and friends.  

We thank you, Holy God, that we gather here today as a community of disciples, those who have heard and are hearing your call to follow.  We thank you that we are sheep who hear your voice, that we are learning to follow with gladness and joy. We thank you for each and every person who is finding new life, new joy, a new way to live, and a new family through the grace of your Son Jesus Christ.

You have told us that though our journey with you is a journey of joy and love, it is a journey that will not always be easy.  You have told us that if we truly follow you, there will always be resistance and misunderstanding from others.  Too often, we have failed to take you at your word.  We have been surprised, disappointed, and angry when others failed to celebrate your work in our lives and have been less than enthusiastic about the change you are making in us.  From time to time, we have responded in anger, or even given up and gone back to our old life.  

Remind us, O God, of the price that you paid to love us.  Remind us of how our world responded to the love Jesus offered.  Remind us, O Lord, of all that our Savior made possible because he refused to stop loving even to death.  Remind us, O God, of all that is possible when your people follow you in loving each other and the world no matter what.  Empower us to be true disciples, disciples who take in stride the misunderstanding and even persecution that true transformation necessarily invites.  Help us to use even the challenging moments as opportunities to let you love and grace shine forth, to demonstrate that your work in us is true, to show the world that we will not be turned back and that the love of God in Christ is the only thing that matters to us, that we will love as we have been loved no matter the cost.

May your grace and love extend to our community, our families, our friends, our church, our enemies, the nations, the poor, those who are sick, those who are in prison, all who mourn, until all the world has become a community of Christ-followers walking together with you in joy and loving community.  Use our acts of grace and love as your tool to make your Kingdom come.

Amen. 

Taking Responsibility in the UMC

I've had a tremendous privilege in my ministry, especially in recent years, to mentor many young people in vocational ministry.  Mentoring keeps me fresh.  It helps me to continually talk about ministry with folks whose passion has not yet been diminished by the grind of daily church life.  It keeps me talking about theology, calling, new ideas, new books.

The youth pastor at our church is beginning candidacy and applying to seminary.  Like me, he comes from a different tradition.  We talk about Calvinism more than I care to.  We talk about reaching people, organizing for effective ministry, dealing with God's people.  It's a very cool thing.  I hope I never get to a place in ministry that I'm no longer surrounded by people who are just starting out and are constantly asking questions.

He's trying to figure out if he's called to be a United Methodist clergyperson.  Today, we drew a scale on the white board.  We put the pro-UMC stuff on one side and the not-so-pro-UMC on the other side.  One surprise: Itineracy was on the pro-UMC side.  We agreed that our system of sending is apostolic and biblical.  We agreed that it is unpleasant.  We agreed that our issues with itineracy (we all have them) are a matter of struggling to take up the cross.  They are our problems, not the UMC's.

I shared the underside of the itineracy.  Biblically, it makes all the sense in the world that clergy (and all Christians) should lay down their lives and make themselves available to Christ to be sent wherever the mission sends them.

The problem is in practicality.  We all have reasons that we find itineracy inpractical.  Here's mine.

The problem, as I see it, is that our system creates the perfect opportunity for everyone within the system to blame everyone else.

Pastors who are unhappy in their appointments blame the cabinet for sending them where they see little opportunity.  They blame religious politics.  They blame recalcitrant congregation members.

Congregations blame the cabinet for sending them pastors they don't like.  Because they do not choose pastors, they can easily avoid responsibility for making things work.  If they had hired their pastors, they could at least say that they had chosen the pastor and ought to live with their decision.  They can blame the decline of the congregation on the pastor and feel slighted if they feel that they had been overlooked for a better pastor.

Cabinets can blame the pastors and congregations for failing to be effective in reaching their communities.

Everyone can blame seminaries.  Everyone can (and does) blame the general church.  We are a big denomination, so we have factions, so we can scapegoat whoever is not in our camp (liberals, conservatives, minorities, majorities, big churches, small churches, on and on it goes).

I suppose all of us have given into this temptation at one time or another.  I have.  I've had times I've felt passed over.  I've had times I've grumbled inside myself about a congregation, a community, a DS, the ineffectiveness of this or that committee, board, plan, or vote.

It's exhausting.  It's fruitless.  It sucks the life out of ministry.  It makes us bitter.  It's a downward spiral.  It produces no life.

There's nothing more invigorating then deciding that wherever we are is the placed we are called to be. And so we can commit to do whatever we can to leverage the life we have been given to do the very most we can to be a catalyst for the inbreaking of the Kingdom of God.  We can be happy in this system, no matter where we are.  But we have to own where we are, what we are doing, the opportunities around us, the people we have been blessed to serve and serve with.  We cannot let ourselves get lost in what someone else got that we should have gotten, how much more money someone else gets paid, or how this or that group said something that's destroying the denomination.

None of us can do anything about the decline of the UMC.  But we can do a whale of a lot to keep ourselves from declining.  We can do more than we probably realize about the decline of wherever we are serving.  I can't do one thing about anyone else.  I can't change anyone else.  But I can do something about me.  I can let Jesus Christ change me.

The UMC gives us an opportunity to preach the Gospel.  For those of us who are ordained, we are promised a lifetime paycheck and benefits.  The upside is that we are free to live a life of adventure following God's call in places we never would have chosen.  The downside is that our system breeds a sense of entitlement.

I don't believe that the UMC can be saved by a program, a speech, better appointment making, an influx of cash, "systemic change," or anything else.  I do believe that I can reach more people with the grace of Jesus Christ tomorrow than I did today.

If I fail, it's no one's fault but mine.    

Pastoral Prayer for 11 Aug. 2013 (based on Luke 12:32-40)

Holy God:

We thank you for your great love for us, we thank you for the great world you have created.  We thank you for the blessings of life and the opportunity to know and serve you.

We thank you for Jesus, who took flesh and walked among us.  He left the glory of heaven and experienced life as we live it.  We remember that he came proclaiming the Kingdom of God.  We have never quite understood what he meant.  How much he must have seen a broken world and known that things could be different.  He certainly taught us to live differently, to value different things than this world values, to invest our lives in the things this world finds worthless, to find treasure where the world see nothing particularly important.

We are grateful because he gave up everything the world says matters in order to spend his life for the sake of love.  That love has made all the difference for us.

So teach us to see as he saw, to put our whole energy, our greatest joy and our only priority, into things that remain, things of heaven things that matter in God’s eyes.

Give us a divine urgency for love, for grace, for friendship, for forgiveness, for joy, for children, for praise, for prayer, for healing, for the face of God, for the least among us.  All those things that seem like religious words were those things for which you gave your life.  So give us new eyes.  May we give our lives for those things.

Amen.