Short Reflection on 44 Years

September 15, 1974,
Grace Moravian Church,
Center Valley, PA

I was ordained into the ministry of the Moravian Church.

Not what would have been expected just slightly more than 13 years earlier when I had my Bar Mitzvah. (God can have an incredible sense of humor.)

For the next 30 years I served four different congregations and then took a leave of absence, then retirement, to move into the world beyond the church. I was already working very part-time as an alcohol and drug counselor, but decided it was time to make that my full-time work. As I said a few years later, I finally heard God calling me into ministry outside the church.

I am still at that ministry of addiction counseling! Back in the 1970s days I used to say that the older pastors should retire when they got to 65. They had earned the rest; they should relax and enjoy life. That kneeling 26-year old in the picture had no idea what he was talking about. I am now 70- and still working. Admittedly it is on an as-needed basis. But for the past four months that has been 40 hours per week. I have no thought of hanging it up. I like what I am doing, although admittedly the 40-hour grind can get a little much. I'm now at 20 hours/week.

But it is always and forever about being there for people. That's what ministry means to me. Over the years I have asked many non-clergy about how they "do ministry" in their daily jobs. Most were not able to answer me because they saw ministry as the work of the clergy. What I do now is not done because I am an ordained pastor (Ret.) Nor is it a job. It is an expression of who I am and what I have received and experienced from God, as I understand God.

It all officially began in that moment pictured above. After 44 years, it is no less exciting. And I still have so much to learn.

On This Date in 1974...

I was ordained into the ministry of the Moravian Church by Bishop Ed Kortz. Quite a journey it's been. Especially after I realized I didn't know what I was doing and started looking around for God.

A 40-Year Memory

I sat in church yesterday before the service started meditating on 40 years. I wondered what I would hear or experience that would fit for this anniversary of my ordination.

Bishop Ed Kortz (r) and District President Thor Harberg (l)

That previous Sunday, September 15, 1974, was a beautiful sunny day in Center Valley, PA. I had been serving the church there, Grace Moravian Church, as a student pastor for a year and was now to be the first full-time pastor at the church in a number of years. Bishop Ed Kortz was the ordaining bishop and Eastern District president, Thor Harberg led the service.

The church was packed. It was a little chapel-sized church that had been a community Sunday School prior to becoming a Moravian Church. With the back door open we managed to have over the 125 that we could seat. Family, church members, college friends, seminary colleagues, clinical co-interns and neighbors made it a day of celebration.

As some of you may remember, I posted back in May on the 50th anniversary of my baptism at age 15. In those 10 years in-between I discovered a great deal about myself and my world. I moved from the small town at the edge of the northern Pennsylvania wilderness to the southeastern PA extended metro area north of Philadelphia in the Lehigh Valley of Bethlehem, Allentown and Easton. I had graduated from college, spent two years working as a conscientious objector, got married, spent a month in Israel and another on a cross-cultural trip to the Navajo reservation with the seminary. Now, 10 years later, I was making my ordination vows as an ordained parish pastor.

I became politically very liberal and was at the early stages of a theological journey that continues to this day. With the trip to Israel in 1973 I began this whole pilgrimage that I now call "postModern". Wikipedia defines pilgrimage as

a journey or search of moral or spiritual significance. Typically, it is a journey to a shrine or other location of importance to a person's beliefs and faith, although sometimes it can be a metaphorical journey into someone's own beliefs.

I am not one who is ever satisfied with where my faith is. Life and events and the world continue to move on around me.I am not the same person I was two weeks ago, let alone 40 years ago. Being a parish pastor helped me in that pilgrimage by continually confronting me with the changes in others, the world we all live in, and myself. I had to work regularly, if not daily, at deciphering the meaning of the faith in that given day and age.

It began earlier than forty years ago today, of course, but September 15, 1974 is one of those major milestones that cannot be overestimated in my life.

As I knelt before Bishop Kortz I knew I was placing myself in a unique relationship to the church. Not to God, mind you. I believed strongly in the ministry of all God's people, the Priesthood of All Believers, but I was being called to a particular type of ministry within the work of the church. My understanding of that has grown, changed, evolved, devolved, morphed and all kinds of things over these past forty years. I am not yet at a place where I am ready to sort all that out. I'm having enough trouble, and fun, doing that with the roots and flow of my life in my roots in the land and water of northern Pennsylvania. When I get done with that, this will probably be my next phase.

Then, 10 years ago I heard- and finally responded to- God's call into ministry beyond the church and its understandings of call and ministry. My second career has led me into even more opportunities that I would never have believed possible in 1974. Some of it strengthened what I thought I knew then; other times it forced me into challenging myself about faith and life and spirituality.

So, going back to yesterday morning in church, what did I discover, hear, or learn? Very simply there were two things. First was a reaffirming of my personal place within the Christian tradition. The Liturgy, the music, the movement of the Spirit within the service all continue to speak to me in ever deeper ways. Sometimes I have to really pull myself back to these basics. Sometimes it happens intuitively. But it does happen if I am willing to let go of my ego and let my God and Savior guide.

This came through most clearly when the pastor made a simple quote from Paul. Sunday was Holy Cross Sunday and at one point all he said was, with Paul,

We preach Christ and him crucified.

I knew I meant it differently that the fundamentalist or evangelical preachers meant it. None of us has the final meaning of such a statement. But I could bow in gratitude and praise to humbly affirm that to the best of my ability I have done that throughout these forty years. For many of those years I used words; now I use words only when absolutely necessary.

Which is the second thing I felt Sunday morning. I reflected on the Christian preaching and the work of the church which was my center of life for most of the past forty years. Even when I left the parish ministry I was still connected. I have preached, I have been a member of churches, my wife continued in her ministry until she retired a couple years ago. The church and its life continues to feed, frustrate and empower me.

But I sat there and knew that my move to a different ministry, and understanding of the place of "not-ordained" ministry was correct. Fifty years ago, following my baptism, I resisted going into "The Ministry." I said that those who are not "ordained" could have a greater impact on their world. Today I would rephrase it in less "either/or" terms, but I know that what I did was respond to God's call to ministry in non-traditional terms. To respond to God to do "ministry" is not a space, location, or theologically-limited vocation. It is the Christian vocation.

So, today I celebrate the ordination that was such a major movement in my journey. I still have a "higher church" understanding of ordination, but higher has nothing to do with importance. It is all for the glory of God. Which maybe the third thing I got from worship yesterday. the Epistle lesson was from Paul's letter to the Philippians. It is wondrous, and deeply moving, no matter how you interpret it within our faith:
Philippians 2...

...have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:

Who, being in very nature God,
    did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;

rather, he made himself nothing
    by taking the very nature of a servant,
    being made in human likeness.

And being found in appearance as a man,
    he humbled himself
    by becoming obedient to death—
        even death on a cross!

Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
    and gave him the name that is above every name,

that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
    in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
    to the glory of God the Father.

A 40-Year Memory: He Resigned!

He was a very sad, sick, paranoid man. Probably an alcoholic. As is so often the case in such situations, he was therefore his own worst enemy. He was not the worst President in history. Far from it. In the midst of his illness he did some things that were almost out-of-character, except for his own self-importance, grandiosity, and narcissism. In today's Tea Party-era, he would be considered an unfit for office "liberal." But it was not his politics that brought him down. When you put your politics into such a toxic personal environment, you are doomed.

He was later pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford. It seemed self-serving and a bad idea at the time. It was not. It saved our country much pain and even worse division. As of this date in 1974, the political storm of Watergate was over, the reign of Richard Nixon finally brought down. He would probably have been the first president to be impeached AND convicted.

On the morning of August 9, 1974, Nixon gave his farewell to his staff. Toward the end he had what Bob Woodward has called a moment of clarity and said the following:

Always give your best, never get discouraged, never be petty; always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.

This could probably explain much of what happened. Nixon was a man filled with fear which often leads to anger and hate. He brought his own defeat.

Which, 40 years later, is what scares me about much of what I see and hear today. The levels of anger and hate is almost visceral at times. It is paranoid and seems good at building "enemies lists." What may keep us from another Nixon-type event could be that at this moment this is not based in one man with a lot of power. While hate may bring on its own defeat, the scary part may be what it does on its way down.

May we not, as individuals and as a nation, fall prey to the always easy road that hate seems to lay out for us. May we instead continue to talk, even in disagreement, and see that we are a diverse and powerful people when we stick with our greater values that have allowed us to survive, even a man like Richard Nixon.

A New Day

Last Sunday, the church I have been a part of for over 40 years made a momentous decision. The national Synod assembly which meets every four years passed a resolution permitting persons who are in a same-sex committed relationship, to be ordained and serve as pastors. (This assembly was about 250 lay and clergy delegates from around the country.)

(Link for more information)

That 40-year number is significant for me. It was exactly 40 years ago at another of these Synod meetings that I began my journey as a pastor in this church. And it was at that Synod that a ground-breaking-for-its-day resolution was passed which did not condemn homosexuality but instead called the church to be open to pastoral ministry for all who might be gay.

This was 1974. For those too young to remember that was only five years (5 years!) after what has since been known as the "Stonewall Riots."

Early on the morning of Saturday, 28 June 1969, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning persons rioted following a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar at 43 Christopher Street, New York City. This riot and further protests and rioting over the following nights were the watershed moment in modern LGBT rights movement and the impetus for organizing LGBT pride marches on a much larger public scale.
--Wikipedia

For gay rights, 1974 was almost prehistoric. Harvey Milk had barely arrived in San Francisco and was still figuring out how he would make a difference.

In 1974 many people would say they knew no gay people. That was simply because most gay people didn't let people know. It was too dangerous. Any gay clergy in our denomination were well hidden. For the church to say that it was okay to minister to them without also adding that they were sinners in need of redemption was a truly forward thinking idea, perhaps way ahead of its time for a small, mainline, every-day Protestant denomination.

In 1974 there were no women clergy in our denomination, though the first was about to finish her seminary studies and, within 6 months, be ordained. There were those at Synod that year who strongly disagreed with what was about to happen. They said it was going against God's Word and God's Will. We were starting down a very dangerous path, they insisted. Most of these did not attend the ordination of our first woman pastor a few months later. They were conspicuous in their absence.

Fifteen years later I was still getting comments from time to time about how women should not be ordained. (I even heard it again recently!)

In 1974 clergy were expected to get permission from their Board of Elders if they were going to perform a wedding where one of the persons was divorced. (Many ignored it, or with the general acceptance of their Board just went ahead without that permission.) A few years later when a divorced pastor was elected to a major office, several people commented to me that this was just wrong.

I mention these two issues because they are gender and marriage-related as well as to show how times have changed. To me this seems like a very short period of time- yet it was so long ago!

Over these past 40 years the church has wrestled long and often with the questions and theology surrounding gay pastors, gay care, gay acceptance. The international church even called on all Provinces around the world to have a moratorium on the issue and associated resolutions, which we in the Northern Province followed. But the questions remained. The biggest was the "internal" church-related question- what about gay men and women in relationships or, where allowed, married?

The church accepted non-practicing (i.e. celibate) gay persons as pastors. Sort of. Some ordained pastors left the church to go into a committed relationship or to get out of the congregational spotlight. Other gay people had their faith strained to the breaking point by not being allowed to become pastors become of their sexual orientation.

Some pastors with gay children were left wondering what they could- or should- do about it. Some were left in anguish. Others became activists.

Even during the first decade of the AIDS/HIV epidemic the church talked about- and cared for- many HIV-positive individuals. But they often avoided the underlying difficulties of homosexuality. During those years I worked with the Wisconsin Conference of Churches AIDS Task Force and wrote our denomination's social issues study guide on HIV. Even then, in conferences and workshops, it was often difficult to keep the issues from impacting each other when talked about out in the churches. Someone always wanted to shift the topic from caring for persons with AIDS/HIV to sin and homosexuality.

Slowly things changed. We learned of more gay persons in our congregations; we saw shifts in public perceptions; a younger generation which has grown up in these past 40 years often wondered what the big deal was.

Four years ago our Province started, again, down the road of discussion and decision-making on the ordination issue. With great leadership and tact on the part of our Provincial boards, listening and discussion meetings were held. People were given many opportunities to hear and speak. It was not easy. They handled it, I believe, superbly, always insisting on our motto: "In all things love."

Last Sunday the resolution was passed, 181 - 62- not an insignificant margin. While the votes were being counted the delegates stood in a circle, holding hands, singing. People on different sides of the issue were moved by the "unity in non-essentials" that this showed. One of the bishops commented that it was the witness of unity that was the big message of the day.

The problems and issue haven't gone away. More questions were raised. More will be discovered. The feelings of the rank-and-file have yet to be heard and considered. The move was made, aware of the potential for divisiveness, but with many prayers that sometimes it is more important to do the right thing.

Several personal reflections have come to me in the past week.
1) It is humbling to see the whole arc of this story from my first Synod 40 years ago. While I was not physically at this one, there was a spiritual connection I felt (and others as well) through Facebook and other social media. My prayer presence was powerful. I have yet to absorb THAT aspect of it. It is also exciting to see the fruits of labor begun 40 years ago begin to become reality.

2) I am reminded of kairos (God's time) vs. chronos (linear time.) In the proper time things happen, not on my time schedule. That does make it very frustrating and even painful to those waiting in linear time. Why didn't this happen sooner? What about those who have been disenfranchised in the past 40 years? We can, of course, ask their forgiveness and then move on together. But to have pushed this on our time schedule and agenda would perhaps have been even more devastating. Plus, all we have is today to do what is right. The past is gone.

3) This is not the first (or last) time that the church has had to deal with difficult issues that are quite divisive. People have left the church, calling it heretical and dead wrong, over many issues. To name a few:

• baptism of infants vs believer's baptism
• slavery and civil rights
• ordination of women
• abortion
• liturgy in the common language of the people
• wine or grape juice in communion
• music in church
• the type of music in church
• and on and on and on

The same will happen over this issue and then another and so on. It was the awareness of this that helped me move through this issue. I remember the Civil Rights divisiveness, I have had to say goodbye to church members who left over our more liberal-middle of the road stance on abortion, at least one family left the church when I went into treatment for alcoholism and history very clearly reminded me that it was an unshakeable, inerrant biblical truth that slavery was just. If every time a potentially divisive issue comes up we hold to the old ways, the status quo or the way we have always done things, we will never go anywhere or do anything. We will allow the church to be held hostage by narrow minorities. No specific church has all the answers; no specific church or denomination has The Truth; no church or denomination can be all things to all people. The Church Universal might, but not any one of us.

That is probably the most important reminder I have gotten out of the struggle on this over the past 40 years. It is important and I think we need to take ourselves a little less seriously on many of these concerns. Let go of our grandiosity, our human tendency to want or think we have all the answers. to be open and listen and continue in fellowship with others.

At the end of the day I am honored to have been a small part of this movement over these 40 years. I am excited by what happened last week and pray that we can all find the joy of our Lord's presence in this work. I am sure he is with us and will continue to be so as we work out the wrinkles and concerns that still exist.

And once more, to the leadership of our Province- thank you for a job very well done!