December 2004 Herald
Even So…, Come, Lord Jesus
By Richard A. Brown
The team of broad-shouldered workhorses turned westward onto Parley Street in Nauvoo heading toward the Mississippi River, gravel crunching under their massive hooves. Their covered-wagon load of tourists bounced along behind as the LDS “sister missionary” pointed out historical markers alongside the road. They contained excerpts from pioneer diaries begun on this same road. Imaginations wandered back in time, while up on the hill a temple looked down, much as the original one had watched its builders disperse.
How had it come to this again? People leaving new homes, loading wagons to hastily head off to someplace else. It had happened in Kirtland, Ohio, then in Jackson, Caldwell, and Daviess counties in Missouri. Different places but, really, the same mob action with anger, violence, suffering, and hardship. Finally, the Saints found safety in Quincy, Illinois, and eventually their very own town, the “City Beautiful,” Nauvoo.
My wife and I were the only non-LDS on that covered wagon last summer. It turned left at the river and circled back toward the Smith family homes, cemetery, and Community of Christ visitors’ center. In a way that wagon ride parallels the traditional way of looking at the two major Latter Day Saint churches: the ones who went west and the others who stayed behind in Illinois. It’s neat and tidy, but leaves out important parts of the story.
A major chunk of Nauvoo’s residents crossed the river in the mid-1840s to trek across southern Iowa before setting up Winter Quarters near Council Bluffs and present-day Omaha, Nebraska. People died all along that route, and an unusually harsh winter later brought much more suffering and death. What’s recalled in the history books, of course, is the great exodus across the plains and over the Rocky Mountains. Rarely acknowledged are the Saints who stayed put along the upper Missouri River.
Some of them didn’t like the theological directions taken by the Council of Twelve Apostles under Brigham Young’s leadership. Others no doubt found the fertile land waiting to be farmed a better option than settling an arid desert with an inland salt sea. Stories are told, too, of Saints who walked all the way west, only to subsequently change their minds (for theological or other reasons) and walk all the way back.
In any event, the farms and religious groups established by scattered Saints throughout southwestern Iowa and eastern Nebraska laid a foundation for the next generation of Saints. When leaders of the “New Organization,” or Reorganization, sought a central gathering place, they settled in Decatur County and founded the new town of Lamoni. Church headquarters, a publishing plant, and eventually a church college were established. But even this gathering spot proved to be a way station. Their passion, their dream of a “City of Zion” with a temple at its center, always focused on Jackson County, Missouri, where, they believed, the reign of God would begin. By the 1920s Independence was, finally, the Center Place.
This historical trivia meandered through my mind as we bounced down Parley Street on that sunny summer day. History hovered around us. Coincidentally it was just a day shy of the 160th anniversary of Joseph and Hyrum Smith’s murder in Carthage Jail. It dawned on me that those wagons on Parley Street back then were part of my heritage, too, and their occupants my spiritual ancestors. Their story, my story, the story of the Community of Christ, are intertwined. Their passion for the advent of the reign of God is a gift for me and us and our children and grandchildren.
What caused those people to repeatedly pick up and head off into an uncertain future? Trouble seemed to follow them wherever they went—or was it that they brought trouble with them or somehow upon themselves? That may never be answered satisfactorily. Yet there they were, once again, ready to cross another river, all lined up westbound on Parley Street.
Nineteenth-century American history is populated with pioneers heading west—to Santa Fe, to Oregon, to California, to Texas, to Oklahoma, always to something better or newer, a second chance for those willing to risk it. The folks on Parley Street were part of that, certainly, but they weren’t just pioneers looking for new homes and new opportunities and new lives. They were called forward by a passion both to usher in the reign of God and to reestablish the Church of Christ in New Testament terms. The communities they created in Ohio and Missouri and Illinois and Wisconsin and westward were spiritual communities, unique and dynamic expressions of Christian discipleship.
Some twenty-five years before, a teenage boy prayed in the woods near his home. He was confused by competing claims of revivalist preachers. He sought answers to questions about sin, particularly his own. He wondered if God had a purpose for him and for others. Joseph Smith Jr. struggled his entire life to adequately describe what happened that day in a grove of trees. As his remarkable life journey unfolded, his divine encounter took on new meanings. We can’t revisit the grove to be with him there, but this much we can know: a great and marvelous work was born.
God almost always starts small like that. In some ways Joseph’s experience paralleled other prophets long before. Jeremiah was still a boy when God called him. Like Moses and others, Jeremiah urged God to find somebody more qualified. After all, he noted, he was just a kid. But God countered: “Do not say, ‘I am only a boy’; for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you” (Jeremiah 1:7–8 NRSV). During his long and eventful lifetime, Jeremiah guided his people from bewildering destruction through exile, captivity, reformation, and return.
God speaks to prophets in different ways, yet the divine Voice will be heard. Elijah was hiding in a cave on Mount Horeb, fearing the wrath of Queen Jezebel and King Ahab, when the “still small voice” of God whispered from behind him, “So, Elijah, what are you doing here?” (I Kings 19:9 The Message). A newly emboldened Elijah ventured from that cave to passionately accomplish the Lord’s bidding.
So, what are you doing here?
I can imagine God saying that to young Joseph, too, and to the Saints lined up on Parley Street, to Latter Day Saint farmers from Wisconsin to southwestern Iowa, to the builders of the Stone Church in Independence, Missouri, to so many others who helped form our heritage. Maybe that’s what Apostle Charles Neff heard in Japan forty-some years ago when the message of the Reorganization began to break out of its Westernized culture, and what other missionaries, apostles, and disciples in dozens of other lands all over the world have heard since. Perhaps that’s the central question we in the Community of Christ face in Advent 2004, as we ponder not just the annual celebration of the birth of the baby Jesus but the Second Advent, the promised coming of the reign of God, somewhere out there on the horizon.
So, what are you doing here?
It’s a question not limited to prophets, of course. I now realize that’s the question God posed to me three and a half years ago as I impatiently waited for my body to heal enough to allow me to go home. It was frustrating to watch other liver transplant recipients be discharged from the Nebraska University Medical Center after a week or two. My stay in Omaha lasted two months.
My post-transplant experience didn’t turn out at all as I’d thought it would. My name had been added to the waiting list in February, just a few days before my fiftieth birthday (talk about a mid-life crisis!). The “call” came thirteen weeks later: Richard, we have a liver for you! Somehow I thought my recuperation would give me time for spiritual growth—journaling deep thoughts, reading uplifting books, and becoming attuned to my inner spiritual nature. Well, that didn’t work out.
The transplant failed and my name went back on the waiting list, right on top. But that also meant I’d die within a week without a new liver. Then my kidneys shut down and I started dialysis. Three days after the initial operation a second donor liver was transplanted. It took a while to work right but it’s still working great today. I was off dialysis after three weeks, just in time for a mysterious case of diarrhea to arrive with a vengeance.
And so instead of following my bliss with spiritual reading, writing, and meditating, I spent weeks doing little more than TV watching, newspaper reading, and toilet sitting. What a waste of time, or so I believed then.
Later that summer I heard Garrison Keillor talk about his own recovery from open-heart surgery. He came to realize that his five-week recuperation was not a lost opportunity to get things done in a world guided by day planners but, in fact, a precious opportunity to do nothing. For him that meant sitting in his bathrobe in a warm corner of the kitchen and watching the world pass by.
That’s when I got it: My time spent doing nothing wasn’t failure; it was a gift.
So, what are you doing here?
Isn’t that really just another way of asking, Who are you? What’s your purpose? Where are you going? We all do that repeatedly throughout our lifetime. Occasionally we might even come up with some good answers. I used to think that life should be about doing those things you’re good at. That’s true, yet there’s something more: discovering what we truly yearn to be and do, then matching that somehow with what God yearns for us.
For the first time in my life I’m serving as a pastor. It is not a job that is coming easily to me. I’ve discovered that I am not, by nature or temperament, a manager, supervisor, or organizer. When forced by circumstances I can do a passable job, but that’s just not something I want to do. Unfortunately for me, that covers a lot of the territory normally expected of pastors in the Community of Christ. To make matters worse, I’ve never been able to delegate responsibility easily, either. Yet there is something about being a pastor that is both deeply fulfilling and anxiety-producing at the same time.
I’m blessed with a wonderful congregation. The members of Colonial Hills have been through a fair bit the last couple of years. In January 2003 a burglar threw a rock through a window at church one Sunday night, foolishly thinking there would be money inside. Before he left the building he started a fire; we’re still not sure why. Virtually everything inside the building was gutted by fire, smoke, and the water used to put out the blaze.
We accepted the gracious invitation of the Woods Chapel congregation to begin sharing their building the following Sunday. Initially we thought we’d be back in our own building by late spring. The task proved much greater than anyone had anticipated, and our pastor asked to be relieved of the job so he could concentrate on the complex reconstruction effort. I was elected in June. After eleven months and expending more than $600,000, we returned for the first time on the fourth Sunday of Advent, just four days before Christmas.
How do you lead a congregation in exile? I suppose it might be just as valid to ask, Who would be crazy enough to become pastor of such a congregation? I have discovered, though, that there are much more important questions than those.
At the same time I became a pastor, Herald House launched a new journal promoting spirituality and discipleship: Face to Face. As its editor I sought to create a new blend of familiar components: first-person testimonies, scripture-based spiritual reflection, in-depth feature interviews, and book reviews. A compelling graphic design tied the parts together.
It was exactly the kind of project I had always yearned to create and edit. Unfortunately, it struggled financially and after six quarterly issues we made the painful decision to discontinue publication. I’m now realizing how much Face to Face has formed me as a pastor and minister, as well as an editor/writer. I don’t think that was a conscious decision, but still it wasn’t entirely inadvertent, either. Here’s what I mean by that: at the core of who I am and what I do as pastor is spiritual yearning. It’s a passion for the reign of God to take hold in my congregation as we discover together what it means to be a “church of Christ” just as those New Testament–era people did a long time ago. That is what being a spiritual community is all about.
Of course, a spiritual community is so much more than its pastor, or even the sum of all its parts. In one sense it’s a bit like a symphony orchestra filled with gifted musicians playing a musical masterpiece. The conductor is the person most often noticed, mostly because he or she stands on a box waving a stick in the air. The individual players know their gifts and have developed them in extraordinary ways. The conductor’s chief task is, first, to keep everybody on the same page and playing in the same key. But then the challenge is to transcend the “mere notes” to create music.
If congregations are indeed spiritual communities, then it stands to reason that it is the Spirit who provides both foundation and direction. I don’t believe it’s possible to manage or supervise the Spirit, nor can the Spirit be institutionalized. Not that we don’t try, though. It’s all well and good to say that God is in charge and that salvation comes by grace, but, after all, somebody has to actually do all the things necessary to keep the church functioning and progressing, don’t they?
There’s simply no way to avoid the hard truth that the Christian life (for individuals and congregations) is a paradox. Paul said it first: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12–13 NRSV). The Catholic mystic Ignatius of Loyola put it even more directly: “Pray as if everything depends on God, and act as if it all depends on you.”
So, what are we doing here?
Are we really so different from our pioneer spiritual ancestors—those folks in Kirtland or Nauvoo or Lamoni or the first disciples in dozens of nations around the world where the Community of Christ now exists? It’s all about passion, about yearning for a relationship with God individually and in community and listening for God’s still small voice whispering and yearning for us. But in the meantime don’t we have meetings to plan, positions to fill, budgets to approve, resources to produce and distribute, and time to find in which to get it all done?
We may worry that the path ahead is unclear: Our theology needs to be more precise and unequivocal. Our history is sometimes untidy and maybe even a bit embarrassing. We take steps forward and then backward, leaving us unsure if we’ll ever make any progress. Every time we find an answer, six new questions pop up to bedevil us. Our institutional structure or programs or methods appear inadequate in a rapidly changing world, so we reorganize yet again.
But are we really so different from those people lined up on Parley Street? Like the very first Christians they yearned for the coming reign of God. They yearned to live peacefully in a spiritual community of Christian disciples. They didn’t know where they were going next—yet they knew exactly where they were going. That makes about as much sense as the Savior of humankind coming as a baby to a poor couple in a backward corner of the world. Or the absolute certainty of God’s peaceful reign in a time of terrorist wars, ethnic cleansing, famines, epidemics, and hungry children everywhere.
So, what are you doing here?
