Presentation by Fr. Tom
Lenten Breakfast 3/22/14
UMC Church, Plymouth
It is great to be here and I am pleased to have been asked to share a few thoughts with you on the topic of strengths. The Dungy book we are using identifies two classes of strengths. There is the assertive, take charge personality that comes across as arrogant. Then there is the supportive and sensitive type that comes presents as a little weak sometimes. Part of his premise is that there has to be a little of both in all of us to be effective. Sometimes things are too tough for us, and we have to break them down into smaller tasks.
This is all wise counsel. I am going to place this question of strength in a more religious context by talking about gifts, discernment and call.
I will talk to you first about some of my own journey and then make some comments about gifts from that perspective.
I was born the first son of an Episcopal priest. I came from a long line of clergy, and I had them on both sides of my family. Most of them were Episcopalian, and I have one guy who was an Episcopal monk and who served as the bishop of Liberia in the 20’s and 30’s. We even had a token Methodist in there. My great-grandfather was a Methodist pastor in TN who began by riding a circuit on a mule. He was later the Sr. Pastor of McKendrie Methodist in Nashville, TN and the president of Asbury Methodist. His obituary said that “He left the Methodist church to better serve God.” He ended life a Nazarene, and he served as president of Olivette Nazarene in Illinois.
I went to an Episcopal college and had every intention of going directly to seminary after earning a BA in English. I was officially “in process” with the Diocese of Upper SC, but I got cold feet. I decided to teach for a while until I figured out where I was going to land. I taught the next 32 years.
During those 32 years, I was always active in the church, and I served as the treasurer of Redeemer Episcopal in Shelbyville, TN during the 80’s. I am one of those odd people who never had the experience of “falling away” from the church. I was a 25 year old who tithed and attended Bible studies and took part in parish work days at Redeemer. I even went to the bishop in Tennessee in the late 80’s to tell him I thought I was called to ordained ministry. He cryptically told me “That may be, but not in this diocese.” I went back and served another term as treasurer and then went to graduate school. My wife had also gone to the bishop and was told the same thing.
I applied to Vanderbilt and Middle Tennessee State University in English. Vanderbilt was my stretch and MTSU was my safety to use the current terminology. I was accepted at both. The challenge was paying for them. To digress a little, my father experienced the Great Depression as a boy, and he was a man who did not believe in borrowing money really. He had drilled this into us as children, and I had finished my undergrad with no student debt. I did not want to borrow for grad school either.
The problem was that they had no teaching assistantships for me at either school. I was trying to figure all this out and got a call from the graduate dean at MTSU. She asked if I could come by the office. She had a proposal for me. I went by and she said that she had looked at my transcripts and test scores. I had enough math courses for a minor, and I had even taken Honors Calculus. That was unusual for an English major. She said if I would declare myself a math major for one year and teach some math classes for her, she would take care of me when I changed my major back to English. I told her that I would just major in math. That was even better as far as she was concerned. I got an office, and a stipend that was about what I had gotten paid in my first year of teaching. All my courses were at no cost to me besides books and supplies. I became a math teacher.
I taught math for the next 24 years. I was teaching for Rutherford County Schools in Smyrna, TN when I got a phone call one day from a Culver alumnus I knew. He told me “I need to show you something, and he came by my house with the alumni news magazine.” He showed me an article about the new math and science building that was being built. He said, “You want to be a piece of this. Look at yourself. You are spinning your wheels and going nowhere. You could be part of something big.”
I called the school the next day and said I was interested in visiting the campus. I explained that I was a teacher who might be interested in teaching there. The secretary explained they did not have any openings, but that I could schedule a visit. She said she would get some information and call back to coordinate details. I gave her a quick thumbnail of credentials and ended up transferred to the Academic Dean. I went for a visit and was offered a job. The family moved to Indiana.
I taught math and coached lacrosse. I worked with instructional technology and Religious Life. I served as Director of Faculty Mentoring.
My wife and I went to the bishop in this diocese and told him we thought we were called to ordained ministry. He said he thought so too and gave us permission to enter discernment one at a time. Being the gentleman, my wife went first.
The discernment process is a blessing in many ways, and there is a team of 8 to 10 people who meet with you about 10 times over the course of a year. There are a series of questions and you write responses to various things to really study what it means to be called and what it is that you are being called to do. At the end, you and the committee come to the same decision if all goes well. If things are really going well, the bishop agrees and does not send you back to discern again.
I discerned a call to the priesthood and started all the psychological screenings and background checks. I started coursework. It had been my vision that I would work in school chaplaincy, but that was not an option for me at the Academies. I became the priest-in-charge at St. Elizabeth’s in Culver while still teaching and discovered I really enjoyed parish work and seemed to do a good job with it. I was called to St. Thomas last year, and I left the classroom for full time parish ministry. Here I am talking to you folks as the priest-in-charge at St. Thomas.
I am going to make some observations here about discernment and call. First this discernment business is a lot more important than we may really think. Think of the decisions you have made in your life. How often might you have benefited from having a group of brothers and sisters from church to help you sort through the decision – to determine where the Holy Spirit is moving in your life? I claim it would have been a help every time.
When people call on me cold to deliver a prayer, I almost always include prayers for the wisdom to discern God’s will and the strength to do it. I am keenly aware of the importance of discernment.
Next point is that God has a plan for each of us. We are members of the Body of Christ. “The harvest is plentiful and the laborers are few.” Use the image that speaks to you, but the point is that God almost certainly does not call us to sit around and watch the weather channel all day. He intends for us to grow in the faith and grow as disciples. He intends for us to exercise our gifts and not hide them away where they can’t do any good for the Kingdom. We have all heard sermons on the Parable of the Talents, and we don’t want to be the guy who buries his.
So now we are all on fire to exercise the gifts of the Holy Spirit. The next question is probably “What are they?” This is a great question. Sometimes you luck out and cross paths with someone who has the gift of discerning gifts. I met a man once to told me he was traveling in India and basically crashed a wedding reception. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and the sense of hospitality was so strong that he could not gracefully exit. He was suddenly an honored guest. The father of the bride came over to welcome him, and took him by the hand. The father looked into this eyes and told him his gifts. Just like that he had someone identify strengths in his life and gave him some direction. Usually it is not so easy.
Dallas Willard is an author some of you may know. He wrote The Divine Conspiracy and was frequently published in Christianity Today. He gave a great speech once at a C.S. Lewis Society meeting that I stumbled on online. It was a speech given to a bunch of academics, and Dallas Willard was a professor of Philosophy at UCLA. He was also an ordained Baptist minister.
This speech was on a topic of great interest to the academics attending this meeting. It was on how a Christian earns tenure in a secular university. He had a simple formula. First you pray for your students. Then you look for where you have had success. You find the places in your life where you did really good work and do some more of it. When you are functioning well and may be just out of your competency really, that is where the Holy Spirit was helping you. It is not that you are just good or got a lucky break. As people of faith we have to understand that God was part of the mix. He gave us strength in our weakness.
Now this flies in the face of popular culture. In popular culture we are all self-made men and women. We set goals and achieve them because we are the masters of our destiny. Popular culture places us and our skills at the center of everything. As Christians we understand that God is at the center and we are doing His work. He supplies us with what we need to carry out His will. With practice we get better and can do better work because we are using our God-given gifts.
Now I would like for you to take a moment and think of a time when you were good. When were you hitting your stride? When did you find success and have the “golden touch.” These times are not affirming that you are better than other people. They are an indicator that the Holy Spirit was moving in your life. Do some more of that work. Keep a sense of perspective and thank God for His many blessings. Remember this is not about you. It is about the Kingdom and your work as a disciple.
So I have talked about gifts and how we can identify them. Now I want to talk a little about call.
We have this image of Paul on the road to Damascus in Acts. The clouds open up and a booming voice tells Paul what to do. We imagine I think that this is what call is like. Now I am not saying this does not happen because it happened to Paul. I think it is more likely though that we will come to slowly appreciate God’s plan. I have talked to other pastors and we have talked about a push or a pull.
It is important to understand though that you have a vocation. God has a purpose for us and we have work to do. Paul in his letter to the Romans (12:3-8) writes
3 For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. 4 For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, 5 so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. 6 We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; 7 ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; 8 the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.
When I think of my own life, I wonder what would have happened if I had stayed in process and been ordained in the 80’s. I think I understood that I was called to ordained ministry “but not yet.” I very clearly understood that I was called to teaching, and I did a lot of it. When the bishop in Tennessee told me “not in this diocese,” I understand now that was his prophetic voice and not his administrative voice. At the time I was a little discouraged. I was good at being a church treasurer. I was good at teaching. I thought I was ready for something else. It seems I was not. Our desires and God’s will are not always the same.
Just because you are called to something does not mean that other things don’t look appealing. I am reminded of Jonah who caught a boat for Tarshish when God was calling him to be a prophet for Nineveh.
The last big idea I want to throw out this morning is that of being open. St. Benedict was a man who had gifts for leadership, and he wrote a set of rules for people living in Christian community. He wrote in the early 500’s. I think the Rule of St. Benedict it is brilliant and have often thought it might make a good faculty handbook for the right kind of school. One of the gems in there involves how we should respond to an unexpected knock at the door. It is in chapter 66.
The porter is the brother who watches the door. He is instructed ‘As soon as anyone knocks, or a poor man calls out, he replies, “Thanks be to God”…’
In our struggle to find our strengths and discern God’s will for us, we have to be open to opportunities for ministry and rejoice when there is an interruption. Too often I think we have our plans and want to tell God so he can have our back. That is not the way it works.
In my own journey, I think the call from the graduate dean and the Culver alumnus were “unexpected knocks.”
My prayer is that you have discerning hearts and an openness to God’s will for you. Study Scripture and stay in fellowship with the saints. You have work to do for the Kingdom, and God have given you the tools you need and a call. Let’s get started. Amen.