From the beginning of my decision to devote my life to theology, I made a concurrent decision always to be involved in pastoral ministry to Word and Sacrament. There was a tradition in the Missouri Synod that no one could teach theology unless he (sic!) had a number of years in pastoral ministry. I thought this was a good policy, if indeed theology is a discipline of the church necessary for the integrity and health of Christian community. In my lifetime I have seen these kinds of commitments wane. But I cannot imagine being the kind of theologian I am without the learning I experienced in pastoral ministry.
My vicarage on Long Island at the nine hundred member Redeemer Lutheran Church in Seaford was a baptism by fire. I believe I buried about thirty people during that year, including the tragic death of a couple in a small plane crash. The reason I did so many funerals was that, just before I arrived, the pastor who was supposed to be my supervisor left town in a hurry when his affair with a staff person was discovered. My quickly appointed supervisor in a neighboring parish did little other than to prevent me from preaching more than once a month. It was sink or swim otherwise. I grooved immediately on being back east but my midwestern bride experienced some culture shock dealing with the thick Long Island accident -- she was quite alarmed later when our little daughter began speaking in Longislandese! But we greatly enjoyed the people and the youth group. They were supportive of us, even as they were dealing with the scandal of the previous pastor’s behavior.
When I entered Union Theological Seminary as a graduate student in the fall of 1978, having received the M.Div. degree and certification for ministry from the Seminex faculty, I discovered that James Thomas, a Seminex graduate a year or two older than me, had become the pastor of Mount Zion Lutheran Church on 145th St. and Convent Avenue in the heart of Harlem. Somehow the possibility of my being called to Mount Zion as assistant to the pastor came up. The AELC bishop, Rudy Ressmeyer approved, and I was ordained in my home congregation, St. Paul Lutheran Church in Raritan, New Jersey in October 1978.
Thereafter Sunday upon Sunday, Ellen and I, with toddler Sarah in a stroller, trudged off to the uptown subway line on Broadway at 110th street, riding to the exit at 145th street. From there we walked long blocks east through a devastated city-scape to Mount Zion. We had some harrowing experiences on these travels. The worst was when an obviously crazed man started shouting at us as we waited on the platform for the subway, “Why do you want to throw that child in front of the train?” I put myself between the man and little Sarah and nervously talked him down. This kind of madness, I realized, formed the environment in which my parishioners lived daily.
We were graciously received and enjoyed the people immensely, even though the social justice accent in my preaching, now on steroids fueled from my Union experience, was sometimes disturbing for these Missouri Synod-formed Christians. The congregation was led by middle-class professionals whose community outreach was a Christian day school. I remember preaching a pretty radical sermon, “Who Are the Thieves?” It called out the deflection tactic of the powerful turning the spotlight away from their institutionalized thievery to focus on the petty thievery of the desperate poor.
On our first Thanksgiving there, James Thomas asked me to attend the ecumenical community service held in a large theater that had been converted into a Baptist Church. Ellen and I and little Sarah were the only white faces in the sea of a thousand or more black ones. As we clergy were marching down the aisle to the melodious sounds of a congregation already in full rhythm, James turned to me and said, “Oh, by the way, they want you to give the invocation.” In the African-American church tradition, the invocation is not the brief naming of the Triune God, but more or less a warm-up sermon in the form of a prayer. As the “Hallelujahs,” “Amens,” “Preacher’s got the word!” and “Rap on, preacher!” responded to my faux-accented extemporizing, “Oh Laawwd, in whom we live and move and have our being…” I felt like Steve Martin at the beginning of the movie, The Jerk. I later told Ellen that “I never felt so white in my life.” But it was a happy experience, featuring a memorable soloist performing, His Eye is on the Sparrow and I Know His Eye is on Me. I had many such wonderful experiences getting to know the Christian people of Harlem. Only later did I learn how this experience of Christians in Harlem had also positively influenced Dietrich Bonhoeffer during his American stays.
Not so happy was when I got tricked by a ghetto hustler, who told me that he had a fabulous slideshow of the Holy Land and would be happy to bring it to our church. So I made the arrangements, including a potluck dinner for people to watch the slideshow. But it turned out that he was hawking pilgrimages so that in your lifetime “You could walk where Jesus walked.” My poor people were humiliated at the sticker price and I was humiliated for having catalyzed this humiliation. After I escorted the guy out, I was feeling deeply embarrassed. As I helped to clean up the dishes, an old saint in the kitchen consoled me, “Pastor, don’t you worry. I don’t need to go where Jesus walked. Jesus walks with me every day.” My ministry there ended when our political preaching got James in trouble with the congregational leadership. When they besieged him, I resigned. Eventually the congregation returned to the Missouri Synod and James moved on. With my encouragement, he enrolled for a postgraduate degree at Union and went on to have a career in seminary teaching.
For the next several years at Union I supply preached throughout New York City. Towards the end of my graduate studies, I was assigned as the interim pastor of St. Jacobus Lutheran Church in Woodside, Queens. I had the difficult pastoral experiences of counseling a teenage girl who I surmised had been in a relationship with the previous pastor who had resigned and left in a hurry. He left the ministry but hung up a sign as a counselor. When I shared this suspicion with the bishop, he decided just to let it pass. I did not know what else to do, so I too let it pass. Another time I had been visiting a young woman in her early 20s who was very sick with leukemia and very angry at God. But I persisted and she welcomed my visits. On a Sunday afternoon, after we had gotten home from a long day at the church her mother called to say she was in bad shape and that I ought to visit. I thought it could wait till the morning but when I arrived her corpse lay there in the bed stiff and cold. I was very angry with myself that I did not find the energy to go on Sunday evening to see her. But all things considered, we really liked this neighborhood and this congregation. As there were no tenure-track positions in systematic theology available at this time, and as I was unwilling to drag my family back and forth across the country taking one year sabbatical replacement gigs, we began to imagine life in Woodside at St. Jacobus. We thought that we were a shoo-in to fill the vacancy, but the congregational council turned us down. We were crestfallen and the only explanation we got from a sympathetic couple on the council was that my political preaching was too edgy.
I have to admit that these experiences at Mount Zion and St. Jacobus sent me back to the drawing board. By what right did I politically opinionate from the pulpit? What kind of new clericalism was this? How infantilizing in a democratic culture for a pastor to tell adults, as if the very word of God, what to think, what to say, how to feel on matters of public concern! Was not the place for such concerns of Christian social responsibility in the classroom, where there can be give-and-take, rather than from the pulpit, where a conscientious dissenter would practically be forced to walk out in protest? The predictable result would force schism along the lines of political partisanship (which is exactly what we see today in American Christianity).
How untrue to Lutheran Christian political realism, in any case, requiring humility in politics, cognizant that our judgments are only ventured, in as much as they are limited by one’s finite perspective with its blind spots and the subtle but sinful egocentrism that inevitably attends them. Particularly disturbing to me was a slowly joining realization about the class-blindness that often attends members of the knowledge class (of which I am a card-carrying member). Regular restraint, by contrast, would lend gravity to occasions of genuine urgency, when a bold intervention is required.
Brooding over such self-criticism, more broadly, I asked myself what really was the purpose of pastoral ministry, the task of preaching and sacramental leadership. Ordination is service to Word and Sacrament – one is set aside to see to it that the gospel is rightly proclaimed and the sacraments administered accordingly, so that in this way the community is properly shepherded and people are sent out from Word and Sacrament to their Christian vocations in the world including the political vocation of citizenship. Should a pastor not trust the Holy Spirit to ferment the word proclaimed in the conscience of the baptized – and respect unpredictable outcomes, outside of clerical control?
So I did a lot of soul-searching at this point. I remember preaching to the folks at Mount Zion in Harlem that it was escapist to flee the city for better living in the suburbs. Now after four years in upper Manhattan, I was feeling the very same need to get out of the crime, the chaos, and the constant humiliation of the poor (in whose ranks at this time we belonged). After I finished at Union, we moved across the Hudson River to Jersey City, where our son William was born. A Lutheran layman rented a very humble (but affordable) house to us. My former boss at the LCA, Paul Brndjar, now happily pastoring, had pity on us when he saw how we were living and invited us to move into the unused parsonage in Garfield, New Jersey. Until this time we were members of St. Peter Lutheran Church in Manhattan, where little William was baptized by Pastor John Damm (who I had known at Seminex where he was the Academic Dean). The LCA was closing down shop in Manhattan, but we were unwilling to migrate to Chicago where the “new” Lutheran Church would set up headquarters. There were still no jobs available in academia. And so we began to think about parish ministry as a new possibility while we enjoyed membership in Brndjar’s congregation in Garfield. He was a positive role model for me as I was rethinking pastoral ministry.
In my last year at the LCA’s Department of Church and Society, worrying about how I was going to be able to support my family, and having had a change of heart after the hard work on the social statement, Peace and Politics, and thusly feeling repentant for taking the college deferment from the draft to avoid Vietnam - I got permission from the Division for Mission in North America to enter the chaplaincy program of the US Naval Reserve. I was almost too old to enlist at this point. But I was accepted and spent eight weeks over the two summers of 1983-84 at Chaplain School in Newport, Rhode Island. I’ll have more to say about this experience in pastoral ministry next time.
My father, a pastor in central New Jersey, became disabled with acute circulation problems in one of his legs, aggravated by a lifetime of cigarette smoking. When he retired early he moved with my mother to their country property outside of Norwich, New York. It was an old farmhouse in need of a lot of repair and modernizing and they, ill prepared, were facing the brutal winters of upstate New York. Because of his disability, we had grave concerns about their safety. So when I heard that a neighboring congregation in Delhi, New York had become vacant, I called Bishop Rudy Ressmeyer to inquire whether I might fit their needs. In spite of my chain-smoking through the interview, Immanuel Lutheran Church seemed happy to call me. And in November 1985 we left the metro-NYC area and moved to the beautiful landscape of the northern foothills of the Catskill Mountains.
To be continued… Soli Deo Gloria!