Spiritual Gifts, Humility, and Happiness

Imagine a saw.  Now imagine trying to hammer a nail with the blade of the saw. It’s not going to work.  It’s more likely to break the saw, or damage the surface which is being nailed, or cut the person using the saw. It’s better to hammer with a nail and saw with a saw. Obviously.

But the same principle is less obvious when it comes to the way we live out the spiritual gifts God’s given each of us.  When we try to do something we aren’t called and equipped to do, we often hurt ourselves and others. For an example from my own life, I’m an introvert. Days of work like yesterday where I have to pretend I’m an extrovert for 15 hours straight leave me cranky and irritable. Sometimes my life feels like hammering with a saw. And I don’t think I’m the only person who ends up in these situations.

This is why I’m grateful for the wisdom Symeon the New Theologian shared about spiritual gifts in “Hymn 54″ of his Hymns of Divine Eros. For Symeon, we are like “inanimate tools”, each fashioned by God for different purposes. ”The artisan of each tool, for whatever desired purpose, / equips the tool to operate according to its art” (lines 9-10). Just as a saw is meant to be used as a saw and not as a hammer, so also we’ve each been given different spiritual gifts and not given others (Romans 12:4).  Because we each have different gifts and not others, pretending we have gifts that we don’t have is downright dangerous. Symeon writes, “if you were to use them for purposes other than for what they were made / then your life and all your works would destroy themselves” (lines 17-18).

How can we avoid such destruction?  What other choice do we have? Symeon suggests a pretty simple answer: to be what we’re made to be.  We have little choice over what our gifts are, but once we live into our gifts, we discover that they pave the road to joy. Symeon writes, “each person is suited not to whatever / art one wants, but to whatever art one was created for, / and to this art one is disposed suitably and affectionately” (lines 35-37).  Notice that we’re not necessarily given the gifts we want.  I may want to be a talented musician, or a gregarious community organizer, or a charismatic evangelist, but God hasn’t made me to be those things.  But once one begins to live into the “art one was created for” one finds that “to this art one is disposed suitably and affectionately.” When we start using our true gifts, we discover how powerful they are, and how much joy they can produce.

Symeon says this transition toward our true gifts requires repentance and humility (line 127). From what must we repent? Perhaps the lies we tell others and ourselves regarding our gifts. Pretending to have gifts we don’t have is simple deception and dishonesty. Let’s be honest about what our gifts are and aren’t. And if we’re being honest, we should remember that humility does not mean hiding our true spiritual gifts. Michael Casey writes, “To deny our gifts is to deny others the profit of sharing in their fruits. Such a refusal can have no part in genuine humility” (A Guide to Living in the Truth: St. Benedict’s Teaching on Humility: Ligouri/Triumph 2001 p. 24).  Humility requires not thinking of ourselves more highly than we ought to think (Romans 12:3). That means repenting of the pride that creates the false-selves and facades we use to impress others.  But humility also means acknowledging that, in the Church, we belong to one another (Romans 12:5). Our gifts are not merely our own, but they are given for the sake of the Church.  To hide gifts God has given for the building up of his Body is like putting a lamp under a basket.  When we repent of hiding our true gifts and humbly bring them into the Light, we become happier and the whole Church benefits.

But this sort of humility requires openness and trust. When Symeon calls us to “Hasten and be glued” to “the hands of God and of his saints”, and live “like inanimate tools doing, or moving, or operating nothing at all without them” (lines 147-148, 152-153), he’s not calling us to be mindless robots. He’s instead calling us to the humble submission to the creative intentions of God and the wisdom of those who’ve gone before us. That sort of humility is characterized by openness to receiving and using the gifts that God does want to give us. It also requires trust.  As an introverted church-planter, I’ve sometimes accused God of using wrong tool for the job. But that accusation both comes from a posture of pride and is rooted in a lie about God’s character.  To humbly pursue the true gifts God has given me, I’ve needed to repent of the mistrust and pride which make the clay question and accuse the Potter (Isaiah 29:16, 45:9)

And where does this road of humility and repentance lead? Symeon says, “as soon as you walk on the straight road / you will become numbered with all the saints, / and it will eventually make you all happy” (lines 161-163).  In context, what Symeon means by “the straight road” is the path of fulfilling the tasks which one was uniquely gifted to do. And this produces happiness. Happy was not the first word that comes to mind when I think of Symeon the New Theologian. Throughout the Hymns of Divine Eros, I’ve seen Symeon extol the virtues of repentance, humility, and mourning one’s sins.  But there is a deep joy that lies beneath the surface of these hymns. It’s the joy that comes from intimacy with Christ, the intimacy of a tool in the hand of its Creator, fulfilling the purposes for which it was created.  It’s the happiness of freedom to be what one was meant to be, the happiness of hitting the nail on the head.

What to Include in a Prayer of Ordination

This afternoon, I will have the privilege of participating in the ordination of a friend from college who will be serving a congregation near Pittsburgh. And not only do I have the privilege of participating, but I have the privilege of actually leading the prayer of ordination at the service. My friend wanted the prayer to be extemporaneous and to conclude by calling the congregation to pray a printed prayer together. I can do extemporaneous.  But I’ve learned from experience that when a prayer has a specific purpose, it can’t be entirely extemporaneous.  Prayers such as those we use to consecrate the Eucharist, or prayers or ordination come out best when the person praying still follows an outline of specific points.  So, I set out on a mission to figure out what these key points should be for a prayer of ordination.  Here’s what I found.

1. In the Presbyterian Church, the Prayer of Ordination is done on behalf of the whole Presbytery.  In other Christian traditions, it is the Bishop who performs the ordination and prays this specific prayer.  In the Presbyterian tradition, the community of pastors and elders known as the Presbytery functions as a corporate bishop.  So rather than one person laying hands on the person being ordained, all ordained people come forward and lay hands on.  The person praying the prayer of ordination prays on behalf of all of them. This is also why I will initiate and lead the prayer, but it will conclude with a unison prayer. All that said, I will begin with an acknowledgement that we are gathered together as representatives of the whole Church.

2. In the Catholic ordination prayers which I read, the prayer of ordination begins by recalling the offices which God has established for ancient Israel and the Church throughout history. This is similar to our Eucharistic prayer which usually begins by recalling God’s faithfulness to Israel up to the time of Christ.  Because the person being ordained is being set apart to function in a similar way, the ordination prayer acknowledges the models of priestly ministry which have gone before: Moses and the seventy elders, Aaron and the priests (Exodus 24). Ultimately, all those ministries pointed forward to the high-priesthood of Christ, so this portion should conclude with thanksgiving for the ministry of Jesus Christ who is both the Priest and Offering reconciling us with the Father in a way no human ministry could (Hebrews 7:26-28).

3. But we don’t thank God only for ordained ministry.  The Holy Spirit gives diverse spiritual gifts throughout the Church, so many prayers of ordination acknowledge with thanksgiving the variety of spiritual gifts present in the Church, including apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers (Ephesians 4:11). “There are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are varieties of ministries, but the same Lord. There are varieties of effects, but the same God who works all things in all persons. But to each one is given a manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Corinthians 12:4-7).

4. Then the prayer gets specific: In all Christian traditions, this prayer calls upon the Father to send the Holy Spirit to fill the person being ordained, so that the person ordained will be able to faithfully exercise the ministry to which they’ve been called.  And notice how the Book of Common Prayer describes that ministry:

May he exalt you, O Lord, in the midst of your people; offer spiritual sacrifices to you; and boldly proclaim the gospel of salvation; and rightly administer the sacraments of the New Covenant. Make him a faithful pastor, a patient teacher, and a wise counselor. Grant that in all things he may serve without reproach, so that your people may be strengthened and your Name glorified in all the world.

Anyone in the Church can proclaim the gospel, teach, or counsel. The one thing that is unique to ordained ministry is the administration of the sacraments. The entire reason ordained ministry evolved in the life of the Church was to ensure right administration of the sacraments. So, the prayer of ordination should draw attention to the sacraments of Baptism and The Lord’s Supper, and also ask God to fill the ordained person with whatever gifts are necessary to administer the sacraments faithfully.

Yams and Manna

A few evenings ago, I stood in the kitchen peeling a yam. Eileen and I were making dinner, using what we had available.  The previous Saturday, I had taken a friend to a food distribution event sponsored by the Greater Pittsburgh Community Foodbank, where he had received a generous amount of free food including frozen chicken, potatoes, apples and yams.  ”I won’t use the yams,” he said, “Do you want them?”

So I stood in our kitchen, peeling a yam for Eileen to roast with some other vegetables on a night when I frankly would have preferred to be at D’s, our favorite local bar and hot dog restaurant.  Eileen and I had just had a conversation about our finances in which I tried to romanticize making do with less. “God is faithful to provide for all we need,” I’d said. As I peeled the yam in the kitchen I realized: This is how God’s providing. It’s not what I wanted or what I’m asking for, but it’s feeding us tonight. That yam was a gift of grace.  But the more I thought about it, the more my thoughts landed on the but it’s not what I wanted part of the sentence, rather than on God’s providing. I felt like one of the Israelites in the wilderness, complaining, “If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost – also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic.  But now we have lost our appetite; we never see anything but this manna!” (Numbers 11:4-6 NIV).

Manna was not what the Israelites wanted. And in their grumblings, they blamed God for not meeting their desires. But the problem wasn’t on God’s end. The problem was that they measured the goodness of God’s provision by Egypt’s standards. Today I fear that in an affluent society like America, we don’t even recognize how often we measure God’s goodness by Egypt’s standards. Maybe manna is all we need, but we’re not going to be content with it if our minds are focused on the things the empire tells us we need. To learn to receive God’s provision with gratitude, many of our worldly appetites have to first be put to death.  Back in Egypt we may have lived the high life.  But God has called us out of Egypt.

As Jan at A Church for Starving Artists wrote recently, there is a cost to following the call God has placed on our lives.  Eileen and I are feeling part of the cost of God’s call right now.  We’re not at home in Colorado, not near family, not making much money, not taking much time to rest, and not always happy. But along with the cost also comes a certain joy.  It’s the joy of looking at a yam and realizing that God really is providing for our every need. It’s the joy of seeing the beauty of creation in the daffodils blooming in our yard right now, a sight we’d see less if we went out every time we wanted to.  It’s the joy of having several friends cheer my soul by visiting me at my cafe on a day where our espresso machine was in need of repair and where I’d started my shift by dealing with a leaky milk dispenser. It’s not always what I would have chosen, but there is room for joy in this life.

And I’m finding that the joy increases when I measure the cost by God’s standards rather than Egypt’s. Egypt may tell us our manna is flavorless and that giving up the delicacies of Egypt was a high cost to pay for following this call. But the Lord can gives us eyes to see manna as the “grain of heaven” and “bread of angels” (Psalm 78:24-25), even to seek the Manna which is the “bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world” (John 6:33).  Egypt may tell us we need a second car, a new computer, a real vacation, etc., but these are small costs compared to the life of the One who “had no place to lay his head” (Matthew 8:21). Egypt may say that the Lord’s provision of yams is laughable, but by the Lord’s standards it was confirmation that he is faithful to provide abundantly more than our daily bread (Matthew 6:11). May the Lord continue to multiply our joy by exposing Egypt’s lies and leading us toward the Promised Land of his goodness and truth.

WCD: Transformative Discipleship For Mission Today

How do you learn to love and serve God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind? Not by using the conventional ways the world approaches learning.  I’m a pastor who’s been to seminary – a very good seminary for which I am grateful and which am happy to support – but I think the Church has become a bit too worldly in the way we train our leaders.  Learning to love and serve God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength is not merely an academic exercise.  It requires the use of all your heart, soul, mind and strength.  Discipleship is meant to be holistic, teaching us to love and serve God using relationships, our experience, prayer, worship, mission, service, and the intellect.

This is why I love the World Christian Discipleship Program. It’s a nine-month program designed for recent college graduates who want to learn to follow Jesus in community together.  The goal is to prepare them to live as missional Christians in any vocation.  Participants study early Church writings, create rules of life as they learn about spiritual formation, and  world mission.  During this time they’re volunteering in a local church and learning to practice living missionally in their workplaces. Participants also go on a short-term mission trip (international or domestic), giving them a cross-cultural mission experience as part of their missional and spiritual formation.  And this isn’t just for people who think they’re called to traditional ministry. It’s open to anyone. The congregation I pastor now has three people participating in it – one’s a nurse, one’s a social worker and future missionary, and one’s a seminary graduate preparing for overseas mission. And I believe that WCD will prepare each of these young women to glorify God wherever he calls them after this.

The biggest reason why I’m excited about WCD, though, is that I’ve experienced the transforming power of its components myself.  One of the books participants read is The Philokalia, a collection of monastic writings from the early Church which has completely transformed my own personal discipleship, the way I pray, the way I read scripture, and the way I approach my role as a pastor. In short, writings like this have encouraged me to pursue prayer and holiness in ways that I never before thought possible.  And with the way WCD is designed, such powerful material for spiritual formation is connected directly to mission.  Participants seek sanctification for the sake of mission in the world.  So they read Lesslie Newbigin beside St. Teresa of Avila. They learn to pray without ceasing while working part-time jobs in the neighborhoods where they live. They laugh and cry together and learn from each other what it means to be the Body of Christ.

I’ve spent three years as a church-planter doing bi-vocational ministry, learning what it means to be engaged in mission in a post-Christendom environment.  WCD offers both the training that I wish I had when preparing for ministry and the transformation I want members of the congregation I lead today to have. Anyone who wants to be truly transformed by God for the life of the world should consider applying.

Defining Success

How would you define success? A friend asked me this question the other day, and after pausing for a moment, I gave an answer with which I’m now only half-satisfied. 

I started by think of the way the world normally measures “success”.  Worldly measures of success are generally related to finances or security. For a follower of Jesus, those can’t be the ultimate measures of success, but we shouldn’t avoid them all together – even in the church, worldly measures may still be necessary factors to consider. For example, Upper Room will have to become financially self-sustainable by 2014 to be “successful” in our goal of establishing a new congregation in Squirrel Hill.  But that example begs the question of why plant a new church? And why in Squirrel Hill?  In order to call new people to participation in the mission of Jesus, joining Christ in the work of reconciling, healing, and transforming the world.  The ultimate goal is not the establishment of a church, but the transformation of lives according to the mission of God.

So, I think I’d define success as life-transformation.  The reason I’m only half-satisfied with the answer I gave my friend is that it described inward-focused transformation.  I’ve been reading a lot of eastern Christian monks recently for whom success would be articulated in terms like ”dispassion”, “theosis” or “divinization”.  So, I articulated success as “becoming more like Jesus.”  The problem is, I didn’t articulate the whole of what that means.  It’s more than just “becoming the best me I can be” – despite the popularity of that teaching.  It’s also more than just cultivating personal disciplines of prayer and breaking sinful habits.  If success for a Christian is being conformed to the image of Christ, then success means going to the cross. Success is death to self.  It’s not measured by upward-mobility, but by downward-mobility, service, and giving.  True success isn’t just self-transformation, it’s inward transformation that leads to world-transformation. 

And yet, transformation of the self is still necessary to effect world-transformation: I can’t join Jesus in opposing systems of injustice and strongholds of evil if I refuse to repent of my complicity with such systems. Personal transformation is necessary for world-transformation to take place.  That requires confession, repentance, and the help of a community of other Jesus-followers.  But those practices are not ends in themselves.  They shape us through our own reconciliation with God to become ministers of reconciliation in the whole world: “If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God” (2 Corinthians 5:17-20).

So, measures of success are both inward and outward – reconciliation in one’s own life and participating in the ministry of reconciliation in others lives.  Applied to the situation of a church, successful participation in the mission of God results in transformation of lives both within and outside the church.  And because transformation can’t always be quantified, we can measure success by stories of transformation, both inward and outward.  The narrative of a person’s life reveals the trajectory of transformation and includes the failures, mistakes and wounds, as well as the times of healing and restoration.  

Whenever my life and ministry come to an end, I pray that whatever success (if any) is attributed to me would be reflected in stories of transformation, both in my own life and in the lives of others.  And I pray that those stories would ultimately reflect a life lived as Christ’s ambassador, letting transformation in my own life lead to greater participation the ministry of reconciliation.

Working for Jesus

Someone at the cafe recently taped this fortune cookie fortune to the cash register: “If you don’t do it excellently, don’t do it at all.”  I’m not sure whether it’s resulted in increased excellence or excuses not to attempt certain tasks, but I appreciate the point: Strive to do everything with excellence.

For a follower of Jesus, I think the point needs to be taken one step further: Strive to do everything in a way that honors God.  One of the hardest places for many people to do this, unfortunately, is their work environment.  Our workplaces are where we spend a great amount of our time every day, but rarely does the church teach disciples well what their faith means for how they work.

I think part of the problem stems from two misconceptions: (1) We assume that a job can only honor God if it’s explicitly ministry related.  Occupations that aren’t “full-time Christian service”,  non-profit work, or dedicated to a noble humanitarian cause get written off as “ordinary jobs”. (2) We assume also that if people have an “ordinary job”, then the only way they can serve God at that job is if they evangelize their coworkers, or attempt to be the moral conscience of the company.   

A helpful corrective for both of these is to see one’s work, whatever it is, as something that is done for God, in the way that Jesus would do it.  In two weeks I get to preach on the household code portion of Ephesians (5:21-6:9).  That includes a passage encouraging slaves to obey their masters.  Without going into detail about slavery in biblical times, it’s worth saying that a common application of this passage in our context today is that of bosses employees and their bosses.  Ephesians 6:7, tells workers to: “Serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord and not people.”  The parallel passage in Colossians 3:23 says, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.”  The emphasis is on how one sees the work that they do, not what the actual work is. 

Dallas Willard has some great words about this in part of The Divine Conspiracy which I recently read.  Willard points out that a disciple is “learning from Jesus to live my life as he would live my life if he were I.”  (p. 283).   This means that we approach our work seeking to do it as Jesus would do that specific task.  So for example, tonight at the cafe, while thinking about writing this post, I had to mop the basement floor.  Mopping a basement would not be the first thing on my list of jobs that honor God if I were operating from the assumptions listed above.  But, thinking about serving the Lord and not people, I tried to do an even better job than I normally would have.  (Our manager will probably read this and tell me in the morning that Jesus would be disappointed with the job I did.  Oh well.  I think Jesus would be proud that I swept the staircase, too.)

Here’s an extended quote from Willard to elaborate on how almost any job can be done for the Lord:

“But once again, the specific work to be done – whether it is making ax handles or tacos, selling automobiles or teaching kindergarten, investment banking or political office, evangelizing or running a Christian education program, performing in the arts or teaching English as a second language – is of central interest to God.  He wants it done well.  It is work that should be done, and it should be done as Jesus himself would do it. Nothing can substitute for that.  In my opinion, at least, as long as one is on the job, all peculiarly religious activities should take second place to doing ‘the job’ in sweat, intelligence, and the power of God. That is our devotion to God. (I am assuming, of course, that the job is one that serves good human purposes.)” (p. 286). 

 The assumption he tacks on at the end is important.  A job that contradicts God’s purposes in this world may not be something we should work at as though for the Lord.  Perhaps working some jobs as though for the Lord means being subversive or prophetic in certain contexts?  More Willard: “A gentle but firm noncooperation with things that everyone knows to be wrong, together with a sensitive, nonofficious, nonintrusive, nonobsequious service to others, should be our usual over manner.” (p. 285)

But back to the original question, what difference would it make for a secretary, a garbage man, a cook, an accountant, or a mail-carrier to see their job through this lens?  How can we better teach this form of discipleship in the Church?  Are there any people who serve as examples, known for doing this well?