Peterson's first chapter is on what he views as the primary angle of pastoral vocation - prayer. He begins the chapter by describing the meaning of ordination as he sees it and his words are so very poignant that I must retype them for myself. Peterson writes these words as the words of the church to the pastor who is ordained and charged to lead it.

"Yet century after century Christians continue to take certain persons in their communities, set them apart, and say 'We want you to be responsible for saying and acting among us what we believe about God and kingdom and gospel. We believe that the Holy Spirit is among and within us. We believe that God's Spirit continues to hover over the chaos of the world's evil and our sin, shaping a new creation and new creatures. We believe that God is not a spectator in turn amused and alarmed at the wreckage of world history but a participant in it . . . We believe all this, but we don't see it. We see, like Ezekiel, dismembered skeltons whitened under a pitiless Babylonian sun. We see a lot of bones that were once laughing and dancing children, of adults who once made love and plans, of believers who once brought their doubts and sang their praises in church - and sinned . . .

'But we believe something else. We believe in the coming together of the bones into connected, sinewed, muscled human beings who speak and sing and laugh and work and believe and bless their God. We believe that it happened the way Ezekiel preached it and we believe that it still happens. We believe it happened in Israel and that it happens in the church. We believe that the most significant thing that happens or can happen is that we are no longer dismembered but are remembered into the resurrection body of Christ.

'We need help in keeping our beliefs sharp and accurate and intact. We don't trust ourselves - our emotions seduce us into infidelities. We know that we are launched on a difficult and dangerous act of faith, and that there are strong influences intent on diluting or destroying it. We want you to help us: be our pastor, a minister of word and sacrament, in the middle of this world's life. Minister with word and sacrament to us in all the different parts and stages of our lives . . . this isn't the only task in the life of faith, but it is your task. We will find someone else to do the other important and essential tasks. This is yours: word and sacrament.

'One more thing: we are going to ordain you to this ministry and we want your vow that you will stick to it. This is not a temporary job assignement but a way of life that we need lived out in our community. We know that you are launched on the same difficult belief venture in the same dangerous world as we are. We know that your emotions are as fickle as ours, and that your mind can play the same tricks on you as ours. This is why we are going to ordain you and whay we are going to exact a vow from you. We know that there are going to be days and months, maybe even years, when we won't feel like we are believing anything and won't want to hear it from you. And we know that there will be days and weeks and maybe even years when you won't feel like saying it. It doesn't matter. Do it. You are ordained to this ministry, vowed to it. There may be times when we come to you as a committee or delegation and demand that you tell us something else than what we are telling you now. Promise right now that you won't give in to what we demand of you. You are not the minister of our changing desires, or our time-conditioned understanding of our needs, or our secularized hopes for something better. With these vows of ordination we are lashing you fast to the mast of word and sacrament so that you will be unable to respond to the siren voices. There are a lot of other things to be done in this wrecked world and we are going to be doing at least some of them, but if we don't know the basic terms with which we are working, the foundational realities with which we are dealing - God, kingdom, gospel - we are going to end up living futile, fantasy lives. Your task is to keep telling the basic story, representing the presence of the Spirit, insisting on the priority of God, speaking the biblical words of command and promise and invitation.'"

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I've started re-reading Eugene Peterson's book "Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity" as my morning devotion. I'm struck by how appropriate Peterson's description of the current reality of pastoral work is to my own experience. He speaks of how easy it is to do the outward and visible work of a pastor without attending to the inward disciplines that form the basis of our calling. Peterson is almost angry as he begins his introduction:

"American pastors are abandoning their posts, left and right, at an alarming rate. They are not leaving their churches and getting other jobs. Congregations still pay their salaries. Their names remain on the church stationery and they continue to appear in pulpits on Sundays. But they are abandoning their posts, their calling" (page 1).

The "angles" in the title of this book are for Peterson the necessary acts of ministry that connect the triangular lines of pastoral work. He envisions the lines of the triangle as preaching, teaching and administration - important work that unfortunately can be accomplished disconnected from the angles - prayer, Scripture and spiritual direction. He writes "working the angles is what gives shape and integrity to the daily work of pastors and priests. But if we are careless with or dismiss the angles, no matter how long or straight we draw the lines we will not have a triangle, a pastoral ministry" (page 5).

"Three pastoral acts are so basic, so critical, that they determine the shape of everything else. The acts are praying, reading Scripture and giving spiritual direction. Besides being basic, these three acts are quiet. They do not call attention to themselves and so are often not attended to. In the clamorous world of pastoral work nobody yells at us to engage these acts. It is possible to do pastoral work to the satisfaction of the people who judge our competence and pay our salaries without being either diligent or skilled in them. Since almost never does anyone notice whether we do these things or not, and only occasionally does someone ask that we do them, these three acts of ministry suffer widespread neglect" (page 3).

Peterson distinguishes between a job and a calling, and he says that when we are given our first appointment as a pastor, we are suddenly asked to do a job, complete an assignment. Deal with the needs of the people in our church. And often, the job that we are asked to do conflicts with our fundamental calling:

"Am I keeping the line clear between what I am committed to and what people are asking of me? Is my primary orientation God's grace, his mercy, his action in creation and covenant?" (page 12).

"How do I keep the line sharp? How do I maintain a sense of pastoral vocation in the middle of a community of people who are hiring me to do religious jobs?" (page 13).

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I love Advent.  It is my favorite season of the church year.  If you love Advent too, then I want to recommend to you an excellent Advent devotional that you can use during this season of waiting and preparing.  It hosted on the blog of Christine Sine and features a different author every day.  Check it out. http://godspace.wordpress.com/

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I subscribe to blog called "Good," but I didn't find anything good about the following post. It makes me sad to read that not only are people of my generation (I'm a Millennial, barely) less religious than ANY generation in history, but that the author of this post sees religious people in such black and white terms. It seems that she equates religiosity with bigotry -- the more religious you are, then the more bigoted you are. Her logic follows that if you are less religious, then you are less bigoted. But she leaves no room for a third way - the reality that you can be a religious person and not a jerk or a hypocrite or a bigot or any of the unpleasant labels that can be imagined. We must find ways to reveal this third way to a world that only sees in black and white. The practice of our faith results not in closed-mindedness or violence, but in peace and justice and love. What has gone so wrong that this isn't apparent, and what do we do about it?

Rise of the Secularists: 1 in 4 Millennials Don't Identify With Any Religion:

For all the attention paid to religious zealots from America to the Middle East, there's another religious trend that should perk our ears up: More young people than ever don't identify with religion at all.
A major new Pew Research study, meant to track voting trends among generations, found that 26 percent of people ages 18-30 said they were unaffiliated with a religious tradition. That still leaves a lot of pious Millennials, but the percentage is the biggest number in history—and the biggest of any generation. An increasing number of young people are no longer banking on church to help our country through the recession, either. Forty-six percent of Millennials see religion as the "key to the nation's success," as opposed to 64 percent of Generation X, 69 percent of Boomers, and 78 percent of the Silent generation (ages 66-83).
This is a big deal, one that could fundamentally change who we elect and how we govern. There are periodic news stories about how many Americans think President Obama is a Muslim, and countless surveys about whether Mitt Romney's Mormon faith will get in the way of his chances to become president. But only about 40 percent of Americans can identify Romney's religion. Among the younger generation, the question may be whether we care about a candidate's faith at all.
I'm part of the 26 percent who isn't religious, and for me, how religious candidates are matters more than to what religion they subscribe. Do they use their faith to prop up bigoted views about gay marriage or reproductive rights? Will they use government funds to favor one religion over the other? The less religious they are, the more likely I am to vote for them. When the Christian right was squawking about Obama's less-than-showy commitment to Christianity, I was ticking it off as a plus, and I wasn't alone. As younger generations become progressively less devout, we may tilt back to a timeworn but often-ignored core American value: the separation between church and state.

The original headline was changed from "atheists" to "secularists" to include agnostics and people of faith who reject organized religion.
Photo via (cc) Flickr user Atheist Bus Canada

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One of my friends shared this on Facebook today.  It's a video of a flock of starlings in Ireland on the River Shannon.  Scientists don't know why the birds fly in this beautiful, complex dance.  It looks ordered and spontaneous at the same time.  I thought it was just an absolutely beautiful example of how nature can take our breath away!

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This morning I read the following article about what it means to occupy God's kingdom. I thought this was a provocative way to describe our calling as Christians. Here's a quote and an link to the full article:

No political protest or government policy or economic system can do what God’s mercy can do. God’s mercy is the only thing that can change the world because it converts us from self-reliant, self-centered people who clutch tightly to what is mine into brothers and sisters in Christ who share freely what belongs to God. We occupy the kingdom of God when we understand that the denarius coin God holds out for each of us is a gift rather than a reward, when we learn that having a job in God’s vineyard is itself a gift and the discipline and skills that we use in that job are also gifts that God gave us.Nothing that we use to earn anything was not given to us by God. We occupy the kingdom when we stop living in the world of earning rewards and start living in the world of sharing gifts.

Ministry Matters™ | Articles | Occupy the Kingdom of God

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I'm a consumer.  I definitely spend too much time buying clothes and shoes and books and fancy food from Central Market.  I admit this.  But I also see the problem with it, not only because of the fights it causes in my marriage ("But honey, it was on sale!"), but also because I see how being a consumer can consume me.  I can get so wrapped up in looking for a bargain, in shopping for something to wear, that I become consumed with the task of consuming.

The preoccupation we have with consumption carries into areas of our life that have little to do with money.  Here's an excerpt of a blog post I read about how our consumer mindset is translated into the church.  It makes me squirm in my seat, because I find it true, but really uncomfortable and unfortunate.  This is out of the book "Renovation of the Church" and I found the quote on the missional church network:

"I don’t know how to say this in a gentle way, but we should not assume that those people who are attracted to our church have been captivated by the message of Christ and his alternative vision of life. In truth, most North American Christians are not riding courageously on warrior steeds with swords waving wildly in the air, crying out, “Let’s change the world for Christ.” Rather, they come in the air-conditioned comfort of their SUV or minivan with their Visa card held high in the air, crying out, “Let’s go to the mall!”

We should be more truthful with each other here. They come because their high-school kid likes the youth program, or because their children don’t get bored, or because they like the music, or because the pastor preaches the Bible the way they believe it should be preached, or because they happened to be greeted by a smiling face one day, or because the worship leaders looks like Brad Pitt.
This is the hard, raw reality of life in the North American church. The people who come to our churches have been formed into spiritual consumers. This is who we are. It is our most instinctive response to life. And you can hardly blame us. Almost everything in our culture shapes us in this direction. But we must become deeply convinced that this is contrary to the teachings of Jesus Christ, the one who invited us to deny ourselves and lose our lives in order to find them. If we do nothing to confront this in our churches, we are merely putting a religious veneer over consumerism and nothing is changed. We offer no real, viable, attractive, alternative way of living. And what is worse, our churches become part of the problem. By harnessing the power of consumerism to grow our churches, we are more firmly forming our people into consumers. Pastors end up being as helpful as bartenders at an Alcoholics Anonymous convention. We do not offer what people really need."

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