Religion is a very scary thing, because a pastor is in a position of power. And if you use that power badly, you ruin people’s lives, and you ruin your own life.
The most important thing a pastor does is stand in a pulpit every Sunday and say, ‘Let us worship God.’ If that ceases to be the primary thing I do in terms of my energy, my imagination, and the way I structure my life, then I no longer function as a pastor.
The minute the church and pastors start saying what do people want and then giving it to them, we betray our calling. We’re called to have people follow Jesus. We’re called to have people learn how to forgive their enemies.
Pity can be nearsighted and condescending; shared suffering can be dignifying and life-changing.
You don’t make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true.
People learn to shop for churches; there is no loyalty to the church. They’re consumers being attracted to one product or another. I think it’s sacrilege, to tell you the truth, it really is.
There is something about Christmas that requires a rug rat. Little kids make Christmas fun. I wonder if could rent one for the holidays. When I was tiny we would by a real tree and stay up late drinking hot chocolate and finding just the right place for the special decorations.
Pastors need to know what’s going on in the world and what has been going on for 4,000 years. We need a way to read Scripture which is imaginative, interpretive.
Suffering attracts fixers the way road-kills attract vultures.
Jesus almost never talked in terms of explaining. He was always using enigmatic stories and difficult metaphors. He was always pulling people into some kind of participation.
In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There’s too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all.
I think pastors are the worst listeners. We’re so used to speaking, teaching, giving answers. We must learn to be quiet, quit being so verbal, learn to pay attention to what’s going on, and listen.
Spirituality is no different from what weve been doing for two thousand years just by going to church and receiving the sacraments, being baptized, learning to pray, and reading Scriptures rightly. Its just ordinary stuff.
Isn’t it interesting that all of the biblical prophets and psalmists were poets?
A person has to get fed up with the ways of the world before he, before she acquires an appetite for the world of grace.
We’ve all met a certain type of spiritual person. She’s a wonderful person. She loves the Lord. She prays and reads the Bible all the time. But all she thinks about is herself. She’s not a selfish person. But she’s always at the center of everything she’s doing.
I don’t want to end up a bureaucrat in the time-management business for God or a librarian cataloguing timeless truths. Salvation is kicking in the womb of creation right now, any time now. Pay attention.
I cannot fail to call the congregation to worship God, to listen to his Word, to offer themselves to God.
The Spirit works through community. Somebody will have a stupid, screwy idea. That’s okay. The point of having creeds and confessions and traditions is to keep us in touch with the obvious errors.
That’s the whole spiritual life. It’s learning how to die. And as you learn how to die, you start losing all your illusions, and you start being capable now of true intimacy and love.