Daily Devotions

Now as an elder myself and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as one who shares in the glory to be revealed, I exhort the elders among you to tend the flock of God that is in your charge, exercising the oversight, not under compulsion but willingly, as God would have you do it —not for sordid gain but eagerly. Do not lord it over those in your charge, but be examples to the flock. And when the chief shepherd appears, you will win the crown of glory that never fades away. In the same way, you who are younger must accept the authority of the elders. And all of you must clothe yourselves with humility in your dealings with one another, for

      “God opposes the proud,

      but gives grace to the humble.”

Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you in due time. 1 Peter 5:1-6

Here is what it is like to write these devotions in the morning.  First, I know I have a deadline.  If it isn’t done by 9:00 am then it won’t make the daily email batch and you will end up not receiving it the day it is written AND you will receive two the next day.  It will then be obvious to you that I didn’t get it done on time and I’ll already know it and I would have been fretting about it since yesterday morning when I missed the deadline in the first place.

Plus, lots of you will write to me and point out what I already know.  I missed the deadline and you didn’t get Tuesday’s devotion until Wednesday when you received both Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s on the same day.  I failed you and I know it.

Second, I get up in the morning, I read the text for the day, and then I take it with me to the back yard for some quiet time.  I sit.  I pray.  I think.  I try to find connections in the text to our lives today.  I follow the old rule we were all taught in speech class 101, “when all else fails, talk about personal experience.”  That is a painful rule for a pastor.

In seminary, at least when I was in seminary, we were expressly forbidden to ever talk about personal experience.  I’ll never forget Sheldon Tostengaard telling us in his heavy Norwegian brogue, “Believe me, your children will never be as interesting to your congregation as they are to you.”  Which puts us between a rock and a hard place.

We can’t talk about our personal experience without a degree of guilt but then we read the letters of the Apostle Paul and see him regularly referring to himself, his conversion experience, and his dealings with other Christian communities.  What are we supposed to do?

I choose to follow the advice of Luther, “Sin boldly and believe more boldly still.”  So my time in the back yard always looks for life connections and I let my life play too.

Which eventually brings me back to this text from 1 Peter.  This is a hard text for me to read as a pastor.  For it is written by a pastor to a pastor with advice about how pastors are supposed to fulfill their callings.

I would love to say that I show up for work every day willingly and eagerly and humbly.  (I actually would prefer to do my job without accepting a salary from the congregation but, unlike Rick Warren and Max Lucado, I write for free and haven’t published anything, let alone a world-wide best seller for which I earn millions of dollars.)  I would love to say all of that (including the world-wide best seller part) but, quite frankly, being a pastor is a hard job.  It might not be hard physically but it wrenching emotionally and spiritually.  Sometimes I feel much closer to Sisyphus, eternally pushing his rock uphill, then Jesus.  And then I bring all of that home to Kelley.  (You don’t want to be Kelley.)

I could say that “I try to be humble” but the truth is that far more often I say or do dumb things where, like it or not, I end up having been humbled.  I doubt I’m alone in that – rare is the pastor who doesn’t sometimes turn into the parking lot of the church without asking why God doesn’t show more grace to the wonderful people of that congregation and send them a pastor more effective, more worthy, more like the pastor they deserve.

So let today’s devotion be my confession as we head together into All Saint’s Sunday.  To me, All Saint’s Sunday will always be a Christian pep rally, a time when the cracked clay jars who have gone before us cheer us on from heaven, for they know that this life we lead isn’t easy.  Let today’s devotion be a reminder that all of us are but saints and sinners – we sometimes do the best we can, we sometimes fall very short, and most of the time we are just trying to make a deadline.

Let us pray:  Dear Jesus, we come to you today with empty hands, knowing there is nothing we have to give you but only to receive.  Thank you for your love, your sacrifice to end all sacrifice, your promise of eternal life.  Thank you for using common things like water, bread, wine, and people, to do uncommon, extraordinary and life transforming miracles.  Thank you for the people with whom we have shared our lives, who now wait for us with you.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

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