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Easter Monday by de Kooning

Easter brunch was thoroughly enjoyed.  Church leaders everywhere are recovering from the marathon of Holy Week events.  Parishioners have taken  lilies from their sanctuary chancels to their home mantles.  And now it’s Easter Monday.

There are many who attended worship on Easter Sunday for cultural reasons:

• It’s what we do with friends.
• It’s the institutional requirement before brunch with the family.
• We go for the extraordinary music and especially fine-tuned preaching and liturgy.

And there are many who attended Easter Sunday worship gatherings for spiritual reasons.  Some of us are part of the church year-round.  But why?  It’s not because we love committee meetings or political church fights.

I was touched by Rachel Held Evans’ post about why she has returned to church after being away for a while.  And I myself ponder why I am still part of the institutional church. One reason is because I’ve seen glimpses of resurrection in my church communities:

• The woman who found help for her addiction in a church basement and when she made the transition to “come upstairs” for a traditional worship service, people welcomed her and sipped coffee with her on Sunday mornings, even though she wasn’t dressed like everyone else.
• The widow who lost her husband and her son in the same year, who was regularly invited to dinner by church friends – especially holiday dinners – after her losses.  She went from a woman who could barely get dressed in the morning to a woman who laughed at Circle meetings with her friends.
• The twenty-something person with no family in town who moved from a studio apartment to a group house to a condo in the course of a year, and found church friends who happily helped her pack her stuff and haul them from one home to the next, and then took her out for pizza.

This is why I am still part of the church on Easter Monday.

Christ is risen!  Christ is risen indeed!

For Christians in the United States, today will probably involve:

• Easter Eggs
• Easter Lilies
• Spring-like clothing (and maybe even bonnets)
• A feast involving one or more of the following offerings:  lamb, ham, asparagus, coconut, jelly beans
• Exposure to bunnies, chicks, and Peeps.

And then on Monday, we will go about our business unless we have tickets to the Easter Egg Roll at the White House or we have the day off to go shopping.

Nobody grouses much about “The War on Easter” but it’s clear that pagan Easter/secular Easter has “won” in terms of the popular focus.  I’d love to know if you are part of a church community that does NOT have an Easter Egg Hunt  this weekend.

It’s The Biggest Sunday of the Year for our churches.   Some people will come for the cultural experience.  Some will expect superb music and elegant preaching.  They will love seeing little children bedecked in pastels.

Do we really need church today?  I’ve been pondering last week’s Newsweek story: Forget the Church; Follow Jesus (with the unfortunate white  Jesus on the cover) and have some things to say about it.  But for now, I am racing to preach in lovely Round Lake, IL for a congregation with no pastor.  And we will sing “Jesus Christ is Risen Today.”  And we will once again tell the story of the first Easter.  And I will say, “Christ is risen!” hoping against hope that the congregation will know to follow with “Christ is risen indeed!”

But what will happen tomorrow – on the day I grew up calling Easter Monday?  Hope you’ll return to this blog so we can reflect on exactly that.

One of the conversations I’m having more and more often – which is about missional ecclesiology, although most people don’t think of it that way – involves congregational mission service.

Some churches – in their annual reports – have long lists of mission projects they serve.  Often they give $200 here and $400 there, which is nice but not life-changing.  We give money to projects we have been been giving money to for many years, even though most parishioners are not personally connected or even aware of those projects except, perhaps, in name only.

Other churches have compassion fatigue and zone out when appeals to give to various mission concerns are shared.

When outreach is tired and people are wondering “how to improve their mission work” I have been asking:  “WHAT BREAKS GOD’S HEART IN YOUR COMMUNITY?”

The answers I’ve received range from curious looks (“What do you mean?”)  to heartbreaking specifics (“Do you mean like teenager suicide?”)  We might think that offering a tutoring program in our community is a fun idea, but maybe the need is not tutoring.  Maybe we’d love to open a cancer support program but the American Cancer Society already does that.

What is the need that’s not being met – or even noticed – in your neighborhood/village/suburb?  What’s breaking God’s heart where you live?  It’s worthy of a conversation.

Perhaps this will become a weekly column:  “Overheard in Church in the Last Week.”  

This is what random people have shared with me in the course of doing professional Christian ministry in the past week:

• “I just want to come to church, sit in a comfortable pew, hear a good sermon, and go home.”
• “I’m preaching on the high holy days of Associate Pastors.”  (The Sunday after Easter)
• “Could you ask our pastor not to cry during the sermons?“

My place of employment now has new digs.  And with a new office comes:

• Re-potted plants
• New neighbors
• New view
• Cleared out files
• New coffee shops/restaurants to check out

My plants now have a cool ledge on my exposed brick wall with huge windows and they are so happy.  I might get cataracts – there’s so much sun in there.   Considering wearing sunglasses all day long to compliment the loft-esque qualities of our cool new space, since I’m feeling kind of hipster now.

Instead of being the only folks in the building, we now share space with assorted secular entities.  Our neighbors include a University of Illinois-Chicago office, a computer software company, and a pizza restaurant.  There are others too, but I haven’t met them yet.  On move-in day, I had the following elevator conversation with a guy named Steve:

Me:  Hi.  We are the new neighbors.

Steve:  Hi.  I’m Steve.  I work for UIC.

Me:  Hi Steve. I’m Jan.  I work for The Presbytery of Chicago.

Steve:  Hi Jan.  What’s the Presbytery of Chicago?

Me:  We work for the Presbyterian Church.

Steve:  ?

Me:  It’s part of the church.  The whole church.  Like a diocese, only Protestant.  And we don’t have bishops.

Steve:  So you’re Catholic?

Me:  No.  We’re Protestant.  Presbyterians.  The ones who protested the practices of the Church back in the 16th Century.

(We have now left the elevator and are standing outside in the wind.)

Steve:  ? So, you’re like a non-profit?

Me:  Yes, we’re like a non-profit.

Really.  This was our exact conversation.  (Note to friends:  nobody cares that we are part of the church.)

We now have a new view which reminds us every day that there is a big world out there that  doesn’t care that we are part of the church.

We have shredded literally tons of paper.  I read many of those files before they were shredded and now I understand – even better than before – why the institutional church has issues.

I have even more new friends to meet in the Greek Town eating establishments.  The people at Artopolis and Meli are among my new pals.  This is one of the most fun parts of being in a new space.

Just as Jesus set his face towards Jerusalem, we have set our faces in a new direction.  We hope it results in resurrection.

Bette Midler sang about it.

During our recent Clergywomen’s Roundtable – the preaching group I’ve been a part of for over a decade – we talked about finding friends.  One clergy sister talked about trying to find a friend in her new position in a new town – someone with whom she can totally be herself.  She literally said to a fun person in town, “I need a friend.”  This worked, but it doesn’t always work.

(In the third grade PM awkwardly came up to me and announced that we would be Best Friends.  It was weird.)

Here’s what I’ve found about friends as a clergywoman:

– It’s hard to be friends with parishioners. Yes, I’ve had parishioners who were friends in a real way, but the truth is that I am always their pastor.  I’ve found that they really don’t want to hear about the pastor’s burdens.  I’ve also found that on my day off, I can’t hang out with parishioners with whom I am friendly because we always end up talking about church.

– It’s hard to be friends as The Pastor’s Wife.  With my real friends, I can share pretty much everything, but if I might be – in any way – disclosing information about my family (the pastor’s family) that feels private . . . well, I just can’t.  My spouse is still their pastor.

I can be friends with other clergy because we share a similar pastoral wavelength.  Someone can say, “angry elder” and the rest of us nod.  We’ve all been there.  Especially with clergywomen, we’ve had similar experiences in terms of comments on our hair and shoes, dating issues (when we were single), funeral directors who are Dirty Old Men, etc.

I can also be friends with non-church people who find the whole church thing to be an anthropological curiosity.  I treasure my friend LB with whom I’ve shared many clergy mistakes and stories I can’t tell anyone else.  Our commonality is our daughters rather than church.  It’s a tremendous blessing.

So, here I am in a new place and I miss the friends I knew after 22 years in DC.  The Divas.  The Lex Girls.  The Busboys Crowd.  I miss the HGers (okay – they were part of my church, but not in any traditional way.)  I miss yoga with S and S – followed by frozen yogurt in Georgetown.  I miss the soccer moms and dads.

New friends will be made here in The Prairie State.  But it takes time.

It takes a late and slowly blooming wisdom
To learn that those we marked infallible
Are tragi-comic stumblers like ourselves.
The knowledge breeds reserve. We walk on tiptoe,
Demanding more than we know how to render.
Two-edged discovery hunts us finally down;
The human act will make us real again,
And then perhaps we come to know each other.

From “Stepping Backwards” by Adrienne Rich.

Thanks be to God for the poets of the world.

Image above is a photograph of Adrienne Rich reading her poems in Bryant Park,  NYC.

One of my favorite parts of Velvet Elvis is the story about people leaving the church parking lot feeling cranky because it was crowded and it took too long to exit.   Rob Bell announced the next week, “If you are here and you aren’t a Christian, we are thrilled to have you in our midst.  We want  you to feel right at home.  But if you are here and you’re a Christian and you can’t even be a Christian in the parking lot, please don’t go out into the world and tell people you’re a Christian. You’ll screw it up for the rest of us.”

Ask anybody who has left the institutional church and they will regale you with stories about:

• mean people
• stingy people
• abusive people 
• bullies
• people who miss the point

Hypocrites are the least of our problems.

Some of us – institutional church people –  find ourselves in the throes of church conflicts or divisions, or even churches leaving their denominations over theological differences.  It’s exhausting.  And it’s distracting from what we are supposed to be doing.

Christians disagree with each other and with others who are not Christians.  Nevertheless, Jesus said something about loving our enemies which includes people with whom we disagree and/or don’t like very much.   It’s rather outrageous to observe people who self-identity with the One who said, “Pray for those who persecute you” and yet they proceed to shred their their pastor behind their backs.    It’s rather stunning to hear people engage in ugly parking lot conversations about other members of their own faith community.  I have personally observed:

• church elders laughing during prayers for their pastor
• a church leader making fun of his pastor’s desire to take a day off
• one pastor denigrating another pastor on the same staff during a church meeting
• a church leader sabotaging another church leader’s reputation

It’s enough to make me wonder why we we stick with  such congregations.  And yet, we can be healthy churches.

Healthy churches hold each other accountable and seek reconciliation.  And my job involves trying to help congregations become or stay healthy.  Sometimes it’s tiring.

I read this article yesterday and can’t get it out of my mind.  

Really.  Abdellah Taïa has been on my mind in the same way that I was haunted by Hassan in The Kite Runner – only Abdellah’s story is not fiction.

This is how God’s call works.  When we can’t let something go that stirs us, troubles us – this is how God tells us to serve in a new way.

Abdellah Taïa grew up as a Muslim in Morocco – a child who was different.  He was gay in a culture where even your family would not protect you, where nobody would dare save you from violent, ignorant men who came to your house in the night.  As I read his article in the NY Times, all I could think about was that – if only Christians were there –  he would be saved.  This is what we believe as followers of Jesus.  Or at least this is what I believe Jesus taught us.

Sadly, 91% of young non-Christians and 80% of young churchgoers say that Christianity is “anti-homosexual” according to a 2007 Barna study.  Where do they get this perception?  They get it everywhere.

There are many of my brothers and sisters in Christ who would condemn Abdellah exactly like his Muslim community.   And this makes me crazy – that people who share the name of Jesus with me come to this conclusion either because of their interpretation of Scripture or “what they’ve heard” Jesus says about homosexuality.

So here is my new calling (and note that 1- calls change seasonally and 2- we can have more than one call at a time):  I want people like Abdellah and his family and friends in Salé, Morocco and all those who believe that God hates GBLTQ people to be saved from that heresy.  I have believed condemning GBLTQ people is a heresy for a while now – frankly after some wrestling with God.  But perhaps God is calling me to do more.

What situation is gnawing at you that God might be calling you to help make on earth as it is in heaven?

Image is the cover of Abdellah Taïa’s book Salvation Army.  When Abdellah left Morocco in 1998, he stayed at the Salvation Army hotel in Paris and found angels there.  Also, do yourself a favor and watch this.

Come, follow me
Matthew 4:19

I believe in The Call.  I believe God calls some to pick up and go serve far from the familiar, while others are called to serve the exact neighborhood where we happen to live.

In this economy, and perhaps even when the economy is strong, I watch professional ministers look for the best paying job rather than a “call.”  A friend once told me that following a true call is a luxury he can’t afford.  He needed to provide for his family and so he took the most financially lucrative job he could find.

I understand this, practically speaking, but there is nothing quite like serving a community where the call to be there is abundantly clear.  I don’t ever want to be in a place where I haven’t been called.  It’s too hard on my soul.

Several friends and I were talking recently about The Cost of Our Call.  What if we’ve clearly been called to a place where the whole family has to move to a new part of the world.  Kids are plucked out of schools they love.  Spouses have to leave their own jobs and leave pensions behind.  Maybe we can’t sell our homes or we must leave close friends and family.  There is often a great cost when we follow God’s calling.  To a person, this group had paid a high cost when they’d followed where God had led them.

Years ago when two missionaries  were kidnapped in Afghanistan, a friend commented that they were asking for trouble by going to a place like Afghanistan.  I remember thinking, “But what if they were called there?  What if that voice whispering in their ears or that deep urge they couldn’t shake made going there irresistible?”  Nobody with a Bible can dispute that God sometimes calls people to go to dangerous, unfriendly places.

Like Elder Price in The Book of Mormon, we might long to be called to Orlando, but sometimes God calls us to Uganda.  Or maybe we are truly called to go move to Orlando.

Are you finding that you and the professional clergy you know are following authentic calls or are we simply taking positions that we can live with?  Hope you’ll share.