A Public Faith

23 poems on stepping back from ministry

by Jeff Gill

* * * * * * *

Bibles piled high

Green cloth bound and worn, an RSV
given at fourth grade graduation
from my Sunday school teacher,
before the congregation.
Frayed along the sweat-marked binding,
held at hundreds of funerals and weddings,
all unimagined when presented.
A map of Jerusalem in the back,
with faint lines tracing modern streets over
the solidity of ancient, invisible walls
were a guide to me and a fellow tourist pastor
when we were lost in the Old City
between the gates.
(I carried it there out of sentiment,
used it from pragmatism, and was
startled by its effectiveness.)

Rebound in leather edges
over renewed covers, still
coffee stained and edge marked,
my Oxford Annotated: a guide
to seminary, and a friend into ministry.
Sermons structured, Bible studies poured out,
Underlining, marginally cluttered, the pages
are full to overflowing.
A bookbinder friend, with ties to Disciple
history and heritage, put her skill
at the service of preserving
my own mindprints.

New black leather, with gold lettering
already worn away in part;
an NRSV, annotated but in larger print,
built for preaching right down
to floppy covers.
Waving my Bible in the air
has never been my style, but flexible
is what I aspire to, if not floppy.
This pulpit Bible started my service here,
dedicated by my beloved to uphold
my purpose and my mission.
When I close it Sunday mornings after reading,
it is to begin the sermon.
I close my ministry now, to begin a new message.

* * * * * * *

A Pilgrim Pastor

My ordination was in a tent, musty and green
that was returned once we ended the scene
of folding chairs and draped tables stood
upon the lawn, next to where we should
have held the ceremony. Condemmed,
it was, a renovation 40 years back intent
on improvement had destroyed in slow motion.
So my home church, another century’s construction
soon would be demolished. We entered illegally,
the ordination party, whispered a prayer quietly,
where my baptism, first sermon, so much more
had happened – then left one last time the door
where I as Jospeh, as Wise Men, as Valjean had entered.
We stood on grass, spoke over traffic’s mutter,
swatted flies with programs, sang together.
(We were, of course, blest with gorgeous weather.)
Then, kneeling where my youth group played at tag,
where the Women’s Yard Sale and Scout’s capture-the-flag,
there the hands of elders and pastors, bishops and friends
laid on my hands and shoulders where yoke-like tradition commands
the blessing needed for ministry in Christ’s name,
the traveling mercies from all those friends who came.
Then the troop struck the tent, and rolled it back,
stuffed it, swaddled it in ropes, on the bus’s rack.

* * * * * * *

Time Management

A little early, October morn, I creep inside
and turn back the clocks. Five of them,
a microwave, a coffee-pot, two thermostats.
With the law’s license and weatherman’s consent,
I steal an hour. I’ll give it back
come Spring, but for now and this winter,
in this sanctuary, the hour is mine.
So many tasks steal my time, it seems,
in keeping up the church,
keeping up appearances,
keeping up with expectations.
Sweeping, mopping, painting, taking out trash,
all feel taken from some storehouse
of work not done, yet undone, still to be done.
This one chore, though, gives me back an hour.
To pray, to read, to reflect, to plan & dream.
It comes back, these chore’s times, to a store
of certainty and hope that work done, work well done
is worth doing, worth doing well,
and will tell, in some record unwritten.
I feel this in that hour, having turned back the clocks.

* * * * * * *

Church Architecture

Akron plan is fine
“Apse and nave” less to my taste
Just keep the Table

* * * * * * *

Long Hallways Growing

Geometry projecting through space
windows and cases under artful fluorescence
shining the terrazzo, easily mopped,
hard to tread at length.
Angling around the narrow halls
windows step back through doorways,
rooms, patientless, patient,
await their projected occupants.
Heart centers, they call them.
Too easily ironic I ask, “where’s the heart?”
The logic of construction is more certain than irony.
Here, there, across town, down the road,
Heart centers aplenty to draw all
diseased hearts to them, and be
Lifted up
by the highway, above the valet parking,
near to the heart of medicine.
And yes, my footsteps echo; hollowly, even.

* * * * * * *

Church, building

“A building not made with hands”
must have no dedications. No plaques,
no inscription tablets to maintain.
“This earthly tent” can be pitched wherever,
dropped as unnecessary, without consulting
trustees, boards, or chairpeople at all.
“A temple for the Holy Spirit” sounds
adaptable, modifiable, changeable
even beyond the dreams of the task forces,
special committees, or vision groups.
What blueprint can encompass “the Heavenly City,
the New Jerusalem”? Which architect designs
“the City of God”?
By the absence of these, we will know
we are in Heaven.
Where they are at work, subject (of course) to the
outcome of the capital campaign,
we will know ourselves to be still
stewards of earthen vessels,
It will be enough to know that they contain
God’s treaure, and recall
that the container is necessary,
even if not the essence.

* * * * * * *

Attic Explorations

Churches have no basements, as houses have.
The lowest floor a room open wide,
while the higher you go are places to hide.
An attic, not a cellar, holds the past.
On past the bell rope, records packed tight,
up wooden stairs no ADA could redeem,
through a hatch flung back athud.
Here the bell perches, weighty but mobile,
ready always to swing and peal.
Beyond the bell are darkness and gables,
below the beams are platforms and piles.
Even across the trusses are draped
old maps, Judea and Assyria folded in mildewed borders.
Christian Endeavor oaths and pledges to the Bible
in Gothic script on oil-cloth sheets, frilling away.
Clawed light fixtures ready for gas laid on,
taken off of walls where they replaced
oil lamp sconces, now relegated here
above the tangle of supplanting wire and aged insulator.
Christ at the door askew, Good Shepherd in litho discolored,
frameless edges showing a former trace,
colors now faded from over-exposure to light.
Might we ascend to our longer term storage,
worn with service, keeping good company,
faded from time spent in the Light;
enduring with the fading tone of the bell,
continuing to far places even dimly,
deepening, dying into life.

* * * * * * *

The Men’s Bible Class at the Rivoli

Restoring the theater uptown
meant paint and gilding,
plaster renewed and ornament replaced.
Joining the crowd back for a show,
there were on view the posters
in art deco aluminum frames, “Gone With the Wind,”
“Metropolis,” “Grand Hotel.”
Carpet once thin now plush,
wallpaper peeled on off, and now
seen and felt in flocked glory.
I had been here before, though
it was my first time inside.
Our narthex at the church had
a picture, “Mr. Fletcher’s Young Men’s Bible Class,
Easter, 1948.” The crowd of men,
high spirits barely hiding behind
stern looks,
gazing row on row back at the camera.
Looking out from the stage,
looking down at
the mustached man in the middle of the front,
who looks back at me each day far more
than any of the hundreds in the Rivoli.
He says, “Look at my class. See my work.
Show me what you’ve done with my legacy.”
He would not be pleased, I think most days.
Particularly Sundays, but surely today.
The Rivoli, and the Young Men’s Bible Class, went downhill;
adult films in the theater, and the young men
met adulthood setting Sunday School behind them.
The neighborhood declined, and rebounded,
the class dwindled, and vanished ---
save five elderly men in the Galilee Class,
who have “temporarily” joined the ladies.
The theater now shows films Mr. Fletcher
would like less than “It Happened One Night,”
but it has opened again, after years of dark.
Young men? Those who are not now old
are now in stadiums, arenas, under domes,
either cheering their teams or
praying their dreams, with preachers
more attuned to their pulses or passions than i.
Mr. Fletcher and I may have more in common
than he’d know, or like, and therein lies the problem.
His approach and my own are more akin
than either of us are to the crowd-pleasing din
of today.
Which is why I’m here, in the balcony,
watching Charlie Chaplin, wondering
what would it take to fill this space
with faces eagerly looking for God’s good news?

* * * * * * *

Idolatry, Isaiah, and Short Chairs

You’ve been to one of these, I know
A conference, modestly run, overcome by registrations
(the speaker committee succeeded beyond
their wildest imaginations),
crams the plenary into the sanctuary,
packs the workshops into the ed wing,
using every available space.
Signing up late (attracted by the keynoter, natch)
I take the workshop I’m given, “The Prophets.”
Exhilarated by the opening, we troop boldly
down Sunday School halls to our rooms.
We prophetic folk are in “The Little Shepherds,”
and the convenor, lately recruited, is aghast.
Every chair, save one, is small.
Very small, in size and height,
and my knees are higher than my hips.
The workshop leader strides in, unafraid,
sizes up the situation, and saves us all.
Inspired me then and now, overwhelming
even my memory of the big name speaker.
He sits in the big chair, beams at us
in the short chairs, on ledges, and on the floor,
and says, “Hosea was speaking of exactly this,”
making our situation part of the explication,
took our expectations, turned them into a story
broke them like idols cast down from their glory.

* * * * * * *

Who Is Evangelized

If Christ is not the only way, why bother?
This question often asked, still grates.
Why bother? Is there time enough to say
all the many, myriad ways Christ relates
our simple selves to a world, a cosmos,
a heaven free of such debates?
And why this passion for negation?
There is the call to share, to spread –
an impulse that can overdo –
to proselytize or baptize your dead.
Evangelism is a very real calling,
and cannot be imprisoned in your head;
for fishing, laboring, harvesting together
the task is out and with and for.
Easy it is to mock the pairs of men
who work their way door-to-door,
but if they burn brighter for denial,
this trial, their calling builds a ready store
Of reasons that the heart knows not of,
stockpiled in the harvest: work done all for love.

* * * * * * *

After the Service

Attending a funeral, as I rarely do,
the pastor in closing
(a rude and homely man)
calls out, “I do not stand at the coffin
as other clergy do, to gather praise.
I’ll come to you.” He stood and thanked
each one in the aisle, inviting them
to hold him close. Or he them.
“So that is why I stand at death’s head,”
I mused. In training, my steps were guided
to that post, to stand and greet,
to stay and meet, with those who needed
to see and weep.

Some fall down,
or start to melt; my task (was told)
to hold, and help
‘til family arms can shoulder in,
support, and bear away.

Still I stand,
a witness, a sgin
that death cannot chase the faith away,
here at death’s door, we fear not to stay.
Or so I was told, anyway.

* * * * * * *

The Casket Door

Two double doors enter in.
One set called “Main,”
the other set rarely said, spoken of,
often used. The name is known,
but rarely invoked.
“The casket door,” thrown wide,
takes steps away and offers up
easy access to the sanctuary floor,
straight to the table to the door.
We set the table aside, when funerals come,
and caskets carried in.
That also is the last door out,
with pallbearers in their place,
the pastor leading,
the coach waiting with open door itself.

We use it every Sunday, but call it
nothing.
Not main, not side, that door.
A long ago plan usefully designed it in,
for carrying out.
We still haven’t figured out
what to call it.

* * * * * * *

At Main St. Christian

See the Jordan scene behind the baptistery
exotic in flatness (and parched plain)
strange with palm trees, rows
over-orderly along the river banks.
Turbaned men in wooden crafts,
Whaleboats extended by an Oriental angle;
Nets, draped and heavy, sag under
A leaden sky once bright blue –
Aged by the ages, long years untouched,
a view of the 20’s as much as 2000 years.
The Jordan rolls mutely by,
frozen in paint within desert horizons,
flowing to and through you,
the baptized, the washed,
heirs of the promise
and the painting.
We are descended from a hand
that painted a sunlit scene.

We inherit a picture changed with time
whose intent changeth not;
but the weathered hues and dust-weighed shadows
make the forecast a dim and stormy one,
filled with threat and gloom.
Who would enter those waters?
A little solution on a swab,
a light wash across the surface,
a few strokes of renewed cerulean,
and the times indeed could change.
But tradition, and no little fear
leaves the canvas alone, unwashed;
and the storm clouds gather.

* * * * * * *

Records On the Wall

High in the steeple
light beams and cross members
intersecting, supporting;
Stage by stage ladders
scissor up to the peak within.
At each level, a panel
of whitewash, inscribed in black
or brown, or tan letters.
Each block tells a date,
and a list of names.
1928, 1934, 1947
Folden, Slater, Sands
1953, 1964, 1972
Dernberger, Mason, Orr
1985, 1989, 1997
The best way to hold and hide
the tally of work done,
the reminder of work yet to do.

* * * * * * *

The Pulpit

This couple (well, her mother)
asked if it could go.
“Go? Go where?”
They were talking about the pulpit.
Old as the congregation – older, really
since the yellow poplar and red oak
of 1867 were trees centuries old
even then. Older than the church itself . . .
Their vision of wedding photos
did not include a preaching stand,
wide and tall, inlaid, crafted by hand,
with square handforged nails and adze marks
inside the unseen back.

In truth, it had been moved often.
From north wall and center aisle days
to west side platform spanning
a now raked room, sloping floor under
balcony rooms added with baptistery behind.
But cracks crossed the coffering, and
the strain of a century and more of preaching
(plus casual pinning of paraments)
had taken their toll.

“It cannot be moved,” I said definitively.
They looked at me, and saw
a wobbly, overcomeable obstacle;
glanced at the pulpit, and saw
solidity, confidence, weight.
“We’ll work around it,” they said glumly
(or the bride’s mother did).
“Does the cross have to stay where it is?”

* * * * * * *

Deathbed Confession

Dying isn’t what it used to be,
a “final battleground of the soul.”
In a long, slow fade
under waves of medicated calm
so little awareness of choice, of choosing,
less struggle, a lighter drama
even as the last act plays out,
once filled with sound and fury –
signifying? Well, in struggle or in sleep,
less than decision,
so slight an occasion,
signifying everything.

* * * * * * *

Preserving Cane Ridge

We had to save Cane Ridge, you know.
We built a stone enclosure around
the wooden galleries,
embracing their hand-hewn table & pulpit.
We walled off the light –
and rain, and rot, and gnawing beetle
or perching pigeon.
We sealed in the old church, and built for her a tomb.

It had to be done, no one doubts.
They did it for Abe (well, not actually his cabin,
but a replica now old itself);
They did it in Capernaum (Peter’s home, that is);
Thus we saved Cane Ridge, and pierced
the walls with stained glass to church it,
and paved the earth to hold it
with flagstones and drainage
around the meeting house.

At night, by moonlight, camped a few yards off,
the lines of stone soften. The trees still bend
over the roofline.
Soil and stone and heat and stars
clamber up and around, bobbing in breezes
not yet felt.
There is a museum, a house, a port-a-let.
All very necessary, so that 200 years
after the Great Revival, this would still be here.
But no one else was.
The anniversary this night, lit by imagined fires,
humming with inaudible murmurs and whinneys,
people by ghosts and gravestones . . . & me.

There was a commemoration under way,
and safely in their hotels and trailers down the pike
were some hundreds – gathered here to mark the
thousands (tens? thirty?) met in the
scattered day of the early frontier.

What could save Cane Ridge? If 30,000 came
and worshiped for a week, then
the ash and sewage and wear and tear . . .
. . . would redeem and baptize and restore
the Cane Ridge that was and is and could be.

As it is, a discreet few stepped through
the ceremonial door, lightly trod the timbered floor,
and left no richer or no poorer.
My tent left no mark, and my trash left with me;
but a jingling of harnesses in the night,
the distant (imagined?) snap of kindling over a spectral knee
gave value to my night there
by Cane Ridge.

* * * * * * *

Hidden In Plain Sight

Backing the baptistery, above
plaster steps leading down, and up
is fixed to the wall
a cross of local wood,
fine grained, rich toned,
cut but full of life.
Once someone said “There’s a story
under that cross.” Indeed.

And it seems there was – when the baptistery
was built, block by block –
hands that shaped an earlier cross.
Thin armed, darker lumber, so then overpainted,
soon a subtle rising in the whitewash.
When the new cross was made,
a voice cried out in the congregation:
“My father set that cross there.”
And pry bar hands were stilled.
Then a craftsman clasped a chisel,
set to work quietly, showed his plan
to those concerned.

The new cross laid over the old,
even more invisible but still in place,
and all was well.
The new cross covered the old,
and all was well.
Everyone who needed to know
knew that the old cross remained,
and all manner of things shall be well.

Well we would be in each change or shift
if we could see the old embedded
in, within the new, as it always is,
hidden in plain sight
underneath the cross of today.

* * * * * * *

The Common Cup

Pewter says old right off,
even polished which it rarely is.
Sideboard safe, a plate for loaf and common cup,
passed to lift communion up,
sipped by lips from aisle to aisle,
face set hard or mouths to smile,
all meeting on that chalice rim.
These days some contact, indirect,
can barely contemplate that connect.
Germs, disease, illness, touch,
we now associate all such
as one. So goes the common cup, apart
save honored memory in the heart.
This now abandoned practice
(as lips now do not touch, or kiss)
gives reason to regret ‘tis gone
for safety now we’re more alone;
a tradition antiseptically tossed,
an image, and actuality lost.

* * * * * * *

Preaching My Heart Out

So the sermon didn’t suit?
I asked, of the elder who took me to task.
The message made a mark, his face showed:
one of discomfort, left dissatisfaction in its wake.
Enough to rouse him to call me to his home.
No; you must understand, I know
good preaching when I hear it, after so many years.
Too little Jesus, too much of you,
he said with satisfaction.
Such a critique I cannot but take to heart.
In whole or in part, more Jesus, less me
sounds right, to me as well as him.
But what were we speaking of?
A message rooted from scripture, that then
tagged the monarch in migration wide,
wove the web of suspension bridges vast,
and returned to Jesus as God’s creation, first and last.
What me? And where was Jesus missing?
Not riding on the butterfly breeze, not weeping
over the loss of their trees; not humming through
the cables strung far
above the roadway for truck and car?
Yet the subjects had caught my eye, not his;
the ideas my mind had illumined, not his:
those images rang cold and hollow in his ear.
There was no reassuring, renewing Christ for him here.
How shall I wear his Christ, to play that part
and seize his heart, putting on the role
already seen, now lost between
his need and what my own heart’s seen?

* * * * * * *

Sun and Rain Out a Sealed Window

A fellow asks, in blue sky thanks,
“Preacher, how ‘bout the rain?”
And an old saying in my thinking clanks
“Can’t take the credit if you don’t want the blame.”
Sometimes people ask for prayer
in hospital or at home, in a time not planned.
You offer words of comfort there,
mindful of the limits wherein you may command.
When words do heal, or organs work
and even nurses say “Well done,”
recall what future setbacks lurk:
defer congratulations while tests are run.
Can’t take the credit if you don’t want the blame.
So true for weather, yet even more for health;
it’s good to bring comfort, but silly to cause pain
by claiming cause and effect by stealth.
We know full well how many prayers unanswered
float down hospice corridors.
Our job is not in claiming, but affirming; we answer
questions, not petitions – for those, we’re auditors.

* * * * * * *

Pillars Of the Church

Boaz and Jachin, these are the names
Bible and tradition (historic and esoteric)
give to the pillars guarding the entrance
to the Jerusalem Temple.
Echoed in our windows, glass stained but restrained,
simple designs with ancient resonance,
Eastern, Ionic, hieratic, symbolic.
Entrance to the holy things of the church
is guarded by pillars still,
who carry newer names,
but whose meaning still is inscrutable.

* * * * * * *

Marriage Preparation

We’ve sat, just three, right here
now with hundreds behind, attendants beside
Standing, robed, suited, entrained,
we share vows that leave nowhere to hide.
The language, yes, of legal bonds,
medieval even edited now,
but unmistakable assertions
of passion, commitment, “and all my wordly goods I thee endow.”

Exclusive and inclusive they are,
and we’ve discussed
the challenge of fidelity, monogamy,
the renewal and reformation of trust
in a relationship beyond the physical,
the nuptial, nearly (?) sacramental.
Have we said enough, we three?
Or did they even notice me, reverential
figure, needed to sign the license.
Perhaps on days to come, in nights too long,
they will recall the meaning if not the memory,
and invoke the Cana winemaker, if not recall their song.

+ + +

October 4, 2004