Remain Until You Leave

Whatever house you enter, remain there until you leave that place. (Luke 9:4, CEB translation)

A couple weeks ago, we got the first announcement in our conference of a pastor planning to retire at the end of this appointment year in June 2020. There will undoubtedly be more. There always are. This year in particular, everyone is watching how many retirements there will be in light of the state of the United Methodist Church. Some may get out while the getting is… not good exactly, but not a flaming hell ball either (though on the other side of General Conference in 2020, who knows?!).

The announcement of a retirement has activated the kitchen cabinets. For those of you unfamiliar with Methodism, or unfamiliar with how your pastors talk within Methodism, the kitchen cabinets are all the groups of pastor friends across the conference who start sharing with each other their conjectures about who will get appointed to any church that is going to have an opening. They are called kitchen cabinets because they mimic the work of the Bishop and the Bishop’s Cabinet, who actually make pastoral appointments.

All this talk among the cabinets, combined with spending a month reflecting on Pastor Appreciation, has me thinking about pastoral transitions.  In fact, I had an opportunity to share with a lay person those very reflections.  It went something like this:

I need you to understand what life in the itinerancy is like. All of us who have vowed into this system, every year we know we only have a year at a time. We know that. But we throw ourselves fully into being part of the community. We love our people deeply and we walk through every significant part of their lives. We do that, right up until the day we know we are moving. That day, though, we start the transition. We still do the work. We are still present. We do the funeral right up until the last day. But we do pull ourselves back. We start getting some emotional distance.

It is the only way we survive this life. You see, we are asked, expected, to love people deeply. And then a day comes, like ripping a bandaid off, when we stop loving that group of people and turn around and start loving another group of people, just as deeply. I know the theology behind this. I know the discipline, and it is a discipline I am called to. But that doesn’t make the reality any easier to live. So when we know we are leaving, we have to start giving ourselves the space we need to survive this life. We have to start making the transition from one people to another.

Pastoral transitions are hard on everyone, even when a church is ready to get rid of their pastor. That change, whether welcome or not, is a moment of loss. I know that laity suffer the pains too. But you lose one. We lose tens. Or hundreds. Or thousands. Also, laity have some luxury about how deeply they invite a pastor in at the beginning. Pastors do not have that freedom. We go where we are called. And often that means walking with people through death and birth within days of arriving at a new place. It is an honor. It is holy ground. It is a privilege I and my colleagues never take for granted.

And, it is hard. Sometimes ridiculously hard.

In this month of Pastor Appreciation, then, I invite us all to just pause and see what those of us who are in itinerant systems actually do. And let’s remember we do it out of love, for Jesus and for Jesus’ people. No one ever said following Christ would be easy. The itinerancy regularly puts that reality in action.

As the Gospel of Luke reminds us, those who are sent out for Christ are called to go into the lives of others. To reside in their home. To be fully present in their lives. The itinerancy is that call lived out. And when we go, we remain… until we leave. And then we leave. And someone else comes behind us, and we trust that they will love you just as deeply as we did. But whether they do or not, we are still called to go.

The verse after the one in Luke quoted here tells Jesus’ followers to shake the dust off your feet if a place doesn’t welcome you. But what do you do about the ones that do welcome you? Eventually, you still have to leave. And then it is not that you have to shake the dust off your feet.  No, instead you find yourself having to shake the dust off your heart. And that is more difficult than we like to admit.