Bread for Shepherds: Lent Devotional for Pastors, Church Leaders, & Seminarians

Singing As We Go

Welcome!

This newsletter is launching with a series of daily Lent devotional reflections for pastors, church leaders, and seminarians called Bread for Shepherds.

These reflections are intended for pastoral hearts. Whatever your background or title, leadership is difficult. One side of my family is thick with pastors: my grandfather was a pastor, two uncles were pastors, my mother entered ministry when I was nine. Ten years after I graduated college with a Christian Ministry degree, several years after graduating seminary with an MA in Theological Studies, I stepped into the pulpit as a pastor for the first time.

How is it with your soul?

If you’re a tactile person who grasps through the tangible, that may be hard to answer, so let me ask this: how is it with your body?

How are you sleeping? How’s your blood pressure? Have you been too sick or busy to go walking or to exercise?

You are so many things and leading in critical times is only one role.

I believe Scripture shows us weighted, stark, or vivid scenes of loneliness, jubilation, companionship, grief, and withdrawal during demanding seasons of ministry. All of these, of course, confront us as we read of God Incarnate so exhausted he’s sleeping below deck through a violent storm; God Incarnate withdrawing to pray; God Incarnate sobbing at the grief of Lazarus’ friends and family, sobbing at all deaths, Death Itself; God Incarnate sitting and eating with friends. Which disciple made him laugh the hardest on the road or while eating? I don’t know, but G.K. Chesterton reminds us that we will all be surprised at what lies at the heart of the Trinity: God’s mirth - deep belly laughs that shake galaxies and rock black holes out of their all-consuming self-importance.

When I was in seminary, I went to church in a small historic frame building perched on a Kentucky hilltop. It was pastored by two professors who donated their time and took turns preaching. The church had a website and an outhouse. A handful of local laypeople – five or six – had kept it open, barely, but when the professors volunteered their time, the pews filled with a mix of people, many from the nearby seminary town. One of the professors who gave his time was from Zimbabwe. He and his family, along with other seminary students from Zimbabwe, filled the pews next to a retired Kentucky tobacco farmer. Some Sundays, the plain wooden floor reverberated with the celebratory vocal blasts of African music and drumming as the seminary students and their kids shared music in their language.

Years later, I can’t think of that music without tears prickling my eyes.

Worship is witness.

Joy is witness.

Choosing to sing is witness.

This is nothing new, but it seems like a season to remind ourselves, like catechumens, of what we already know.

In present-day North America, there are few places where groups of coworkers walk together to work. It’s difficult to think of any places where groups of coworkers walk together to work and sing as they go. If there is a helpful image, however, for our movement forward in the coming months, it might be the image of travelers and coworkers walking along a road singing the same song together. Whether the words or the tunes are ours or belong to the people around us or in front of us, it’s all the same song:

Worthy is the Lamb who was slain.

Holy, holy, holy.

Heaven and earth are full of your glory.

…that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow, of things in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Throughout this season, let’s bring our hearts to God – our griefs, our joys, our worries, our gratitude – inviting the Holy Spirit to take our pulse, peer into our mouth, listen with a stethoscope, and tell us the findings.

Even as we do this, let’s quiet our breathing, close our eyes, and listen for the sounds of distant music.

One day in seminary I stood in an old building waiting for an elevator. Sound caught my attention and I turned, smiling. The seminary president’s wife, Jerry Dunnam, was bending over eye-level, laughing with some children; she stood up straight and with exaggerated motion bent arms and legs into marching movement, singing the words to a hymn:

We’re marching to Zion

Beautiful, beautiful Zion!

We’re marching upward to Zion,

The beautiful city of God

The children smiled, adopting her posture and marching motions.

What verse opens that hymn?

Come, we that love the Lord,
and let our joys be known;
join in a song with sweet accord,
join in a song with sweet accord
and thus surround the throne,
and thus surround the throne.

As we invite God to search us and know us, in our peripheral vision let’s keep in sight our sisters and brothers on both sides of us, behind us and in front of us; let’s learn new tunes and add our voices; let’s wave people over to join our journey; let’s slow our pace for the infirm or hoist them on our shoulders; let’s pass around our loaves, our fish, our cooler of water; let’s sing as we go.

And as we sing, let’s close our eyes and listen for the rollicking joy erupting from the heart of God: the deep, musical delight of God’s laughter. Come, we that love the Lord, and let our joys be known…