I fell in love some years back with this thing Jesus called the Kingdom of God. It struck me as a very radical notion. I needed a unifying vision of the world as radical as the life I was living. I was working, at the time, as a community activist/social entrepreneur. I had founded something new--something that by its very presence in the world was (I believed) creating "change." I was helping kids who were in trouble. I had a purpose: telling people not to give up on kids or neighborhoods, but to see them as places where great and beautiful things could emerge. I was eating vegetarian, living on $20K a year, each day was full of meaning because the work was important--I was making a difference. I knew that this was exactly what Jesus had been talking about: a whole life re-orientation toward simplicity, beauty, justice, integrity, sacrificial love.
I fell in love with the Kingdom of God and I just knew I was living it.
I knew that I wanted to proclaim the Kingdom. And if I wanted to do that and get paid for it, my tradition says that you go to seminary. I went to a good seminary, a great place to learn; a part of the great Protestant "establishment." I graduated, got engaged, had a family to support, and so I got a great job at a good church--also part of the Protestant "establishment."
In the four and a half years since I became a pastor (ostensibly here to teach and show people about this radical, world-turned-upside-down "Kingdom"), my life has felt like it's become safer and more conservative than it has been since I was a child.
I preach well-constructed and thoughtful sermons--but I don't preach the sharp edges of the Gospel that I know. I offer care for people in truly difficult life situations and that companioning is the best part of my job. But few of the folks I work with take up the kind of radical social commitments that I once presumed were part of following Jesus. I wear a robe and smile and shake hands on Sundays and I help people to feel good about being at church and at my best I help them to pray and think and grow in faith.
I make a good salary. My congregants like and respect me. I feel secure in my work. But am I making a difference? Maybe more pointedly: am I making the right kind of difference?
I've made a sacrifice to work in the church--I am living a more economically secure life, but because I work in a large, moderate institution, I am not preaching, teaching, or living the same vision of the Kingdom with which I first fell in love. I measure all of my blogs, my comments, my public pronouncements so as to make sure that I don't say anything too radical about the demands of the gospel, lest people observe the hypocrisy of my radical Kingdom vision against my none-too-radical life. I've sacrificed my own sense of the Kingdom's demands in order to pastor to a congregation who may or may not ever see those demands--and if they do, they certainly won't see them through my example.
Is the sacrifice worth it? Will the "radical" Jesus in me slowly die over time? Will God continue to prod me and convict me of the truth of the Kingdom or will I shut down and tune out, the tension between what should be and what actually is too difficult to bear? Is this the way it has to be for parish pastors? Perhaps I frame the whole struggle wrongly: perhaps my vision of "radical" Kingdom living is just my own version of a Pharisaic purity code? I don't know. But it feels worthwhile to ask these kinds of questions out loud every now and then.
What a wonderful post David! Please KEEP posting these types of questions, as we all need to KEEP asking ourselves these things! Linda
ReplyDeleteI, for one, see and fall in love with God's Kingdom demands through you. In fact, it was something you said at Connection two years ago which prompted me to fast for Lent... which, I'm pretty sure was the beginning of the end of life as I knew it.
ReplyDeleteIt's nice to see you honoring where you've been and contemplating where you are. Perhaps you won't stay here forever, but for now, I (perhaps selfishly) think that you are doing world changing Kingdom work.
Your post makes me remember a line from the Katha Upanishad that inspired Somerset Maugham's title for "The Razor's Edge":
ReplyDelete"The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard."
I think the Upanishad was talking about the difficulty of reigning in our thoughts and controlling the actions of our body: if we can think pure thoughts, we control our senses, intellect, body and actions, which leads to non-attachment and eventually an escape from the endless cycle of rebirth.
But specific to your post, entering Jesus' "narrow gate" is like walking a razor's edge, no? We'll never be perfect--whatever that means, anyway--but we do the best we can within the tension of Jesus' teaching and our own life circumstances.
Over the last several years, you have inspired me both to serve and to grapple with how I can live a more Christian life, and for that I'm profoundly grateful. And to answer your question, I'll quote Paul from my favorite book, Philippians:
"Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. I do not consider myself to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus."
So, David, enjoy the life you have. Take Beth out for a good meal and buy James a new toy. And keep struggling with the questions so we can walk on this journey with you.
The tension is not between what is and what "should be," but between what is and what "will be." The Kingdom is God's, not ours; the Scripture passages that reveal the Kingdom also obscure it.
ReplyDeleteOscar Romero put it beautifully:
"It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.
The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction
of the magnificent enterprise that is God's work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying
that the kingdom always lies beyond us."
My suspicion is that, until Christ's return in glory to bring the Kingdom in its fullness, our earthly pilgrimage will be mostly fits and starts, glimpses, peaks, and valleys.
A real question worth asking is "what do we mean by radical?" I'm open to the notion that Jesus was radical - but I doubt he was radical in exactly the same way that strikes 21st century North Americans as radical.