A Gift That Keeps Giving

Four years ago come Christmas, while serving as interim pastor at Salem Covenant Church in New Brighton, then little Erin Shannon came up after worship one Sunday morning in late Advent with a Christmas gift for me.

"I want to give my pastor a Christmas gift," she told her mother, "and I want it to be a really good one." Well, what she gave me was a timeless gift, here pictured, a gift that I have been opening regularly ever since, one that never fails to feed my spirit and bring me back to ground zero in life, which is my relationship to God.

"The wise lover," a Kempis imagines Christ speaking, "regards not so much the gift of Him who loves as the love of Him who gives.... The noble lover does not rest in the gift but in Me Who am above every gift."

My thanks, Erin, for giving me such a wonderful gift that Sunday--a classic gift that does not wear out with use but keeps drawing me and my spirit toward the Gift beyond all gifts. Through Thomas a Kempis you have time and again renewed my communion with God himself, ever willing and ready to feed my hungry soul and supply its deepest need.

Each time I read from The Imitation of Christ I think of you and the wonderful personal note you enclosed with your gift, now inserted in its front cover. And I pray in hope that you yourself and all the generations surrounding you now will find your place in the company of God's people who are longing for and seeking daily, like me, the salvation--that wholeness in life--that only he can supply.

Wait for God to Come to You

In one of his "Letters of Spiritual Counsel" Martin Luther (1483-1546) offers some suggestions on how to pray to, of all people, his barber. It is included in a section of letters he wrote over time to "The Perplexed and Doubting."

Stressing the importance of being persistent in prayer, he counsels his friend not to put it off when there are too many things to do. On the other hand, he writes, "it is true that some tasks may confront you that are as good or better than prayer, especially if they are required by necessity. A saying is ascribed to Saint Jerome to the effect that every good work of the faithful is prayer, and a proverb declares, 'He prays double who works faithfully.'"

Confessing times when he himself became "cold and disenlined to pray on account of my preoccupation with other thoughts and matters (for the flesh and the devil always prevent and hinder prayer) I take my little Psalter, flee to my room, or if it is during the day and there is occasion to do so, join the people in church."

The secret then is to wait on God, not talk so much as listen--using models like the Ten Commandments and the Lord's Prayer to focus one's mind and calm one's spirit. Further, he suggests, it is well to go through such models slowly, a phrase at a time, pausing whenever and whenever something seems to emerge and engage one's attention. "When such rich and good thoughts come," he suggests, "one should let the other prayers go, make room for such thoughts, listen quietly, and by no means present an impediment, for the Holy Ghost himself is preaching here, and one word of his preaching is better than a thousand words of our praying."

I am alone as I write this, in my quiet study, away from the noise of media and the hustle and bustle of my daily round. And the silence surrounding is wonderful. It illumines my sense of sin and unworthiness but it never ends there. It also butrusses my trust in God's promised forgiveness and once again heals my self-inflicted wounds.

I do not thus wait enough on God. Do you? If in Advent we are to be guided to where God has already come in flesh and is yet to come in great power and glory, ought we not be still before him more than we are?

'So to Speak' the Word of God

Years ago now, at a gathering of Partners in Covenant Communications, Herbert Palmquist opened a wonderful window for us all on the craft and art of preaching. It all began with the humorous story of an elderly janitor in the old Lafayette, Indiana, Covenant Church, who in taking him on a tour through the facility chorused all his descriptions of settings within it with the phrase, "so to speak." Pointing to the platform area, for example, he said, "There is where the choir sings, so to speak, and there [referencing the pulpit] is where the pastor preaches, so to speak." No matter where Palmquist was led the same chorus applied--the kitchen where the ladies cooked, the bathrooms where people "relieved themselves," curtained off places where Sunday School teachers taught, a janitor's room where his tools were--every place was tied to someone who did their thing there, "so to speak."

We were all in stitches, until Palmquist artfully transitioned to what he as a preacher had come to share. With an inviting wisdom born of disciplined labor over years and an evident awareness of the mysteries that remain beyond all our efforts to proclaim God's word, he invited us to explore with him what it means "'So to Speak' the Word of God. "

David Buttrick in his classic book on Homiletic (Fortress, 1987) believes that "a sermon built on "three points and a poem" is dead: rationalistic, linear, ineffective as it was. Even today's 'biblical preaching' gives us a past-tense God of past-tense events whose past-tense truth ('original meaning') may be applied to the world, while God remains hidden within a gilt-edged book." Such preaching, Buttrick says, failed to name God in the present world. Preaching "must dare to name God in conjunction with the world of lived experience." When we "name God with the world, then biblical stories become meaningful....

"So what are we thrown back on?" asks Buttrick. "We are flung back on a confidence in the gospel, trust in the grace of God, and prayer for the Holy Spirit with us... [Preachers] have been chosen to speak God's own word. No wonder year in, year out, preaching is terror and gladness.... We speak as we live, in the mysteries of grace."

'In the Wilderness ... Prepare the Way of the Lord'

I have heard it since childhood, and sung it in youth, and preached it over two generations. Yet at no time in my life has the call to prepare the way of the Lord seemed more urgent.

Think of some stark statistics that recently came to my attention. The average pastor currently stays in ministry 11 years, two or three pastorates at most--before abandoning the office. The same is true of marriages, which on average last no longer in America. What is happening in the soul of America? And given the exponential rate of change these days--not to mention the explosive nature of political and even religious life--what is likely to stem the flow?

I confess sometimes to feeling like Jeremiah who spoke of shedding rivers of tears over the people and conditions of his time. Why with a loving God, almighty and everywhere present, are we as God's people settling for so little, if indeed paying attention to him at all?

Why, indeed? Hear again the good news of Jesus Christ, who in coming among us to teach, suffer, die, and be raised from the dead has already established the kingdom of God among us. And to what end? Not simply to fit us for heaven someday and deliver us from this sinful earth, but to put us to work here and now as an earnest of the same kingdom yet to come in its fullness when Christ returns a second time.

N.T. Wright in his new book, Surprised by Hope, has renewed my own energies toward that end. He is clearing my cluttered mind of the problems by opening up in fresh, new perspectives the solution to them all, already given and at work. And in the process he is renewing my sense of hope.

If in Advent this year your own faith needs reviving, pick up Wright's book and let it take you as it has me on a wonderful journey through Scripture. It will supply a whole new perspective on yourself and your role in God's kingdom work. Unreal as it may seem on the surface of things, God's right hand and his holy arm have already gotten him the victory.

Surely it's time, therefore, to stop bemoaning all that is wrong with his world and engage it rather in the power of God's Spirit and Word. Our calling is not to leave this world but to love it as he did and await with great eagerness the day when his kingdom now manifest in us will become fully known in the whole world.