Faith Works 2-27-21

Faith Works 2-27-21

Jeff Gill

When it's not about what you want to do

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Second Sunday of Lent tomorrow. Easter is coming April 4th, but first we prepare to make the journey with Jesus to the cross. There's more to Easter, but all roads go through Calvary. That's why Lent is a penitential season, even a sacrificial season. 

We don't tend to want to make sacrifices, not on our own. Our tendency to self, our general orientation to me first, you second, has to receive a divine corrective, a grace from without to transform the struggle within. It takes an openness to God's activity in the world, and a willingness to work with choices that aren't always apparently to our benefit, to make that first step into holiness, and wholeness.

Jesus says to Peter that the time will come, for him as for all of us, when he will have to go where he does not want to go. And as is so often the case in scripture, Jesus is speaking to us. That passage is for the one spoken to, and it speaks to the audience of faith. "Where you do not want to go."

One year ago, I had no intention of resigning from pulpit ministry. I had some short and long term goals in mind for the church I was serving. There was a vision I was still struggling to speak clearly, and invite others to follow, for the community as a whole. There were obstacles present, but they were fairly typical ones for a church of this area. In the extended church family, we had six funerals since Christmas Eve and had another clearly coming in hospice. Times I'd hope to pivot to a new stage of ministry would turn back to loss and grief and memorialization. Our losses included some pillars of our church which involved the mourning and sorrow of much of the congregation, so momentum tends to stop when everyone has to turn in that direction.

Then my father died. His loss, along with other family complications back in Indiana, suddenly meant I was gone for weeks just as the pandemic was announced March 11, and I was gone or in transit pretty much through Easter. I tried to get back into the online rhythms we were establishing, but it quickly became clear that my family needed me to be away every other weekend, and that this would be the case for a long time. After brief consideration of some kind of leave, and seeing the open-endedness ahead, I gave my notice, and concluded my ministry to that church in August.

For a preacher, there are certain rules, guidelines in some church traditions and canon law in others. One is that you stay away for at least a year. There's a cold logic to this, and the roots of it go back to the 1950s and 60s when in many traditions some of the first diverse clergy candidates came into parish ministry. Without a clear and sweeping guideline like this, parishioners would go back to the retired or former minister, often male and white, rather than turn to the new pastor to allow them to care for them and enter into a ministerial role in their family, for baptisms and weddings and funerals.

Generally, a preacher and their family finds a different church a ways away and goes there. But a strange and disturbing part of the COVID circumstances that helped force me to this choice is that we can't go to another church, either. Caring for an elderly father-in-law regularly means we have to be twice as cautious, so after 40 years of pretty much unbroken church attendance, we're part of the online congregation… of many churches. Like many of you.

This is not where I ever wanted to be; it's not where I wanted to go a year ago. But it is beyond a doubt where God has put me. And I'm learning from this dislocation. I'm experiencing things many of you have and are experiencing, things that having a settled and regular church home, even by video, insulate you from. I'm learning, and I'm getting chances to share perspectives and counsel with a surprising number of fellow clergy still in the thick of things.

This is not where I wanted to go. But it is where I am, and I'm learning this Lent how to be at peace with that. Which is what Lent is for.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's not preaching much these days, except in text and print and posts. Tell him how your faith has been forced into new paths at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.