LOVE

Why do we cheapen and devalue the most powerful gift of all?

I realized - again - this week that one of the best parts about being a pastor is also one of the hardest parts about being a pastor. See, when you strip away all the ugliness: the tendency of the clergy to seek church careers for their own self-aggrandizement, the shameful history and propensity of all forms of abuse in the church, the general sense in America that religion is at best, irrelevant — what I’m left with is this little calling to love and be loved.

The best part about being a Pastor is that my most important work is to love and be loved, and I even get a little paycheck tied not to output or capital but instead, in the best of all worlds, to love.

Loving people is something that I know how to do well. In all the places I’ve lived, in all churches I’ve worked — from Southern California to Vegas to Florida to Chicago to rural Minnesota — I have fallen in love again and again. Of course not in the romantic sense of love, but instead in the sense of love that we celebrate in this, the fourth week of Advent.

As much as I romantically love my spouse, love is so much bigger than romantic relationships. Love instead, as we remember this week, is not an infatuation or an emotion but an action and a choice. And God chose first. God chose to create out of love. Then, God chose to be born in Jesus — again, out of love. God chose to die out of love, and God chose to resurrect. All because of love.

I’m not saying it’s all the time or even every day, but even despite the bad press, love is alive and well in the church. I’ve experienced it powerfully in my past three years as Pastor of Grace Lutheran Church, in Brownton, Minn., a small town about an hour west of Minneapolis.

I love the Grace kids so very, very. much.

I came to Grace in 2019, a few months before COVID and a few months after the release of my first book, Red State Christians. I came to Grace after two positive but also challenging experiences in very large, metro congregations. The first, in Southern California, was rocked by political polarization and a divided church staff after the 2016 Presidential Election. The second, in the Twin Cities, involved the departure of a beloved lead pastor for health reasons, and the struggle of a large church staff and board to all get back on the same page in the absence of her leadership.

I came to Grace much as my grandpa had decades before me come to rural Minnesota as a pastor, following his divorce from my grandma. In these little towns he sought to live out the calling he had chosen (and the calling that had chosen him) after an aborted career as a professional baseball player, and congregations that had loved but also hurt him deeply, in Nebraska and Kansas City.

Surely much had changed in the decades between my pastoral call to rural Minnesota and my grandpa’s time in ministry in rural Minnesota, but also some things had not changed. There were the stalwart church families, the ones who built the churches with their own hands, cooked Easter breakfast, sang in the choir, rang the bells, chaperoned the youth trips, plowed the parking lot, led the church as pastors cycled through. There were the pianists, the choir directors, the ones who volunteered to scrub the toilets and vacuum the floors and mow the lawn and climb the ladder to change the light bulbs in the sanctuary.

I hate to break it to all the folks who are yelling right now about the collapse of organized religion and the idea that there is nothing, not at all, left worth salvaging of American Christianity — but many of those people are still there, a whole lot of them in rural churches like the ones my grandpa and I were blessed to serve. Maybe now it’s their kids or their grandkids, though one of my 90+ year-old members was still helping make lefse this year for Advent, and my 90+ year-old grandmother just this year decided it was time for her to be done with bell choir.

And I hate to sound sappy but what keeps this whole ill-advised venture going, where you have no real money-making scheme except asking people to share their money with you as the church and the pastor — asking people, most of whom don’t have much money themselves — and still what really keeps this venture going, I truly believe it, at the bottom again and again you find love.

I have. I did. I do.

And whew. This week is hard, because I am saying goodbye to that church who I’ve loved and who has loved me, Grace Lutheran in Brownton, Minn. For a long time now I have been pulled apart by so many callings, this continued call to write and speak to the larger church; my call to my immediate family here in Minneapolis; and my knowing deep down that I could not be the pastor that Grace needed right now, with so many other callings tugging at my heart, and living an hour away, here in Minneapolis. This past week I notified my Church Council, staff, and congregation that my final Sunday would be Jan. 15, 2023.

Then, I had to write to you about love: the word we remember this fourth week of Advent.

The other part that is so beautiful about love is that, when we choose to love and be loved, we realize that what’s keeping this love possible is ultimately not us at all. I can leave Grace knowing that God was with me there that whole time, making ministry and understanding possible even in the midst of COVID, George Floyd, Jan. 6, and difficult conversations and misunderstandings and cultural differences. I also know that God was at work at Grace for a very long time before I came there. More than 100 years, to be exact. And it was God who helped them raise the rafters and God who walked with them from the old church building in town to the new church building where I led them, a walk which first happened decades ago but sometimes still seemed like yesterday to the ones who had been there and were still there, loving and being loved.

Love hurts <insert 70s song here>. Every time I prayed and thought about the time coming that I would no longer be Pastor of Grace, my heart ripped in two and faces swam before me: the little girls who bounced up and down in my office, smiling and telling me jokes and giving me hugs. My Bible Study. The couples who had been married longer than I’d been alive. The baptisms. The funerals. The hospital visits. The farms the fields the national holidays the basketball games the town baseball stadium. The freshly laid eggs.

There was so much more I could have done, so much more I wanted to do. More kids to confirm, more people to baptize, more weddings to pronounce and celebrate. More hope more peace more joy. More love.

Still, I keep remembering Hebrews 12, and the promise of a “great cloud of witnesses,” and I know, like the church people I’ve loved and lost in the past, so too will I take Grace’s great cloud of witnesses with me now wherever I go. Love makes that possible. And I will keep choosing love, even as it hurts, just as God chose to love and be loved in Bethlehem, in a manger, 2,022 years ago.