Sacramental Living

Health insurance. Seriously! Since I resigned from the typical pastorate, I needed health insurance for my family. So I took the job.

Okay, that may have been a big motivator for any job, but here I am serving as a manager for a shelter and transitional program for the homeless and working poor. I could be employed doing something that has nothing to do with my life mission. Instead, here I am. And I love it. Why?

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Yesterday, I resigned from my position as lead pastor at a local parish.  God has been leading me and my family into something different.  It has been gaining traction and synergy for some time, and I will soon tell more.

For now, I must share the page from Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost for His Highest for yesterday, September 30.  It was timely and a perfect expression of where I am these days:

The Assigning of the Call

” I now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up in my flesh what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ, for the sake of His body, which is the church . . . “

-Colossians 1:24

We take our own spiritual consecration and try to make it into a call of God, but when we get right with Him He brushes all this aside. Then He gives us a tremendous, riveting pain to fasten our attention on something that we never even dreamed could be His call for us. And for one radiant, flashing moment we see His purpose, and we say, “Here am I! Send me” ( Isaiah 6:8 ).

This call has nothing to do with personal sanctification, but with being made broken bread and poured-out wine. Yet God can never make us into wine if we object to the fingers He chooses to use to crush us. We say, “If God would only use His own fingers, and make me broken bread and poured-out wine in a special way, then I wouldn’t object!” But when He uses someone we dislike, or some set of circumstances to which we said we would never submit, to crush us, then we object. Yet we must never try to choose the place of our own martyrdom. If we are ever going to be made into wine, we will have to be crushed- you cannot drink grapes. Grapes become wine only when they have been squeezed.

I wonder what finger and thumb God has been using to squeeze you? Have you been as hard as a marble and escaped? If you are not ripe yet, and if God had squeezed you anyway, the wine produced would have been remarkably bitter. To be a holy person means that the elements of our natural life experience the very presence of God as they are providentially broken in His service. We have to be placed into God and brought into agreement with Him before we can be broken bread in His hands. Stay right with God and let Him do as He likes, and you will find that He is producing the kind of bread and wine that will benefit His other children.

The grapes are being squeezed.  This is the sacramental life!

Over at Young Clergy, I stumbled on this little gem which aptly describes why we need culture change in the church for a new generation of clergy to be welcomed, nurutured, and sustained:

I am finding out time and time again that we do not have a welcoming culture, but a culture that says it is your job to become one of us. Do the paperwork in a timely matter and that proves your worth. Do this and do that and that will show you care enough…

I have learned that a call for a pastor should not be a call to “come be one of us, do what we want you to do.”  No, no, no.  The call comes from God and invites us to go be agents of change, renewal, and vision.

It seems that our Church culture has not embraced this movement yet.