For This Reason 22

[HKHaugan]

Truth arrives in signature packages. What leads one into a profession? Those two thoughts, seemingly unconnected, one a statement the other a question, describe the opened ended experience of determining what we do with our lives. It’s very possible that you find other statements and questions to explain how you got where you are. One thing is for sure both truth and question huddle in heart and mind pushing us to articulate personal meaning and purpose.

Signature packages are those that arrive demanding the receiver’s handwritten acceptance. You may or may not know what the contents are but you sign hoping it is finally the arrival of something you ordered or are surprised and discover it is an unexpected gift. Coming from a non-Christian family descended from a Scandinavian state church heritage I knew no denomination or spiritual tug until I was thrust into the nightmare that was New York City. Initially that was where I was born but early years blur in slight recollection.

As I have mentioned already, it was a youth group in an Episcopal church where I received my first package. I signed a baptismal certificate on Saturday and a confirmation certificate the next day on Sunday. The package was an identity. I accepted its Episcopalian contents by memorizing a catechism, reciting creeds, having hands laid on my head by a bishop and gaining the special privilege of serving a priest at the altar as an acolyte. But the reality of it was I had been accepted by a group of peers in a safe place called church and the truth it contained I recited at its services. My heart was more in the ‘being accepted’ without having to prove myself.

I remember little of what spiritually happened there but several important influences got my attention. They were packages that I put on the shelf for years and didn’t realize they would be opened at a later time. The first was the minister, a dignified Englishman, who every Sunday, would climb a short spiral stairway into the pulpit and preach sermons that got my attention but never dented my ‘only child’ aloneness. I knew there was something right about him. He and whoever was behind all the gorgeous architecture and elaborate rituals had a real connection.

A second package I signed for like a COD was the ticket I bought when I went to an early 1940’s movie called “The Keys of The Kingdom.” Gregory Peck played a missionary priest in China. It was based on an A.J. Cronin novel and traced the trials and hardships he found in his calling. When I came out of that movie I had a sense that I was supposed to do what he did. Not to become a Roman Catholic priest but to be like the rector of my church. That package was stashed in my attic for a few years because at sixteen I graduated high school, worked a couple of farm jobs, bartended in a Long Island resort, got on the road hitchhiking and finally ended up in Jacksonville, Florida working in a shipyard.

It was there another package was given me and that was being an acolyte in a cathedral church that eventually sponsored me for seminary. But the decision to become a clergyman was one that demanded a college and seminary education, a seven year process that had to be OK’d by a bishop. This whole package I signed up for and was ordained in 1959 attested to by my signature---documents in package received.

Packages continued to be delivered in the form of assignments to mission churches, youth ministries and even prep school chaplaincies. In those packages were demands that I preach, teach, make Episcopalians and pastor real live people who needed spiritual support which I stumbled through in spite of my spiritual condition. I didn’t have a personal relationship with God the Son regardless of how many times I said the ‘I believe’ creeds, celebrated Holy Communion, preached cultural drivel and pastored using psychological niceties.

It was in between the two prep school jobs that I received an authentic calling, a spiritual calling. But it wasn’t dressed in the formal attire of a call from an institutional congregation. It was a personal decision I was called to make when I had to deal with the person of Jesus and whether or not all that these denominational beliefs had said about Him were true. It was a call to the truth I had been mouthing but not taking seriously, personally and heartfully.

There was no lightning strike or major crisis or dramatic conversion experience though, at the time, I was cornered without a job and a family to take care of. It was what I believe to be a call to personal faith in Jesus, to trust Him and to trust that the Bible was not just a religious book but a spiritual set of documents that brought Him to live in the heart. There was nothing emotional involved. The demand was a clear step of faith that Jesus was real, died for me on the Cross, resurrected from the dead to be my Savior and Lord and the One that placed in my mind the demand to accept Him by faith. The decision to believe with the mind, trust with the heart and act in faith with a born again spirit was the call I had to grow in in each of those areas that are the image of God in me.

That call to faith not feeling (emotional experience seemed to predominate the local culture’s concept of conversion) was where I found what one of my professors in seminary spent all his time advocating was true, justification by faith. It’s faith not feeling that makes us right with God. But one more thing he always added because it came from Scripture. We are saved by grace through faith. It’s amazing how you can sing a song about grace but never grasp it until you look back and see its effect from your birth. Somehow God really cares for us far beyond the emotional ties we may have because of Him.

Further it doesn’t depend on how much I understand in my intellect about Him. And it doesn’t matter whether or not I have mystical thoughts and visions or speak in tongues or prophetic words. It’s all about faith in Him, who He is and what He has done. That’s what that man in the pulpit in New York City knew. That’s what two bishops I first worked under knew. That’s what my friends who were praying for my conversion knew, one a psychiatrist, the other a youth missionary. In the long run I think that is what I was praying for too but too proud to admit that I never knew what I was really doing while dressed in a collar. I had all the theology, the reputation for youth work, supportive congregations but no clear view of grace or the faith that comes through it.

It was grace that led me to read John Stott’s “Basic Christianity’ and Michael Green’s “Runaway World.” Those were books that put flesh on the bones of my faith. It took 37 years including 10 of those years in the ministry before I took grace through faith seriously enough that I am no longer a nominal Christian but more clearly a disciple of Jesus, God the Son. It is grace that put me in the Scripture to teach it and let it be His Word instead of my scanty observation about it.

Now too I sense that grace through faith is a work of the Holy Spirit who makes Jesus real, personal and close at all times.

If anything is true about religious institutions in general, their lack of taking the Holy Spirit seriously stands out in their leadership. Across the denominational spectrum we can see cultural compromise in their leaders. If Jesus is personal and real it is the Holy Spirit whose power and wisdom make Him present in the heart and leaders worldwide avoid His guidance.

So package and profession are works of grace and I might add a very patient grace, very caring grace and a very embracing grace. Perhaps you have pondered your own life experience and are trying to pinpoint the “why’s and wherefore’s” of it all. From package to profession or vice versa we all traverse the brief span of this world and see it as God has placed us at this time and place for His purpose. The truth for me came in signature packages opened both immediately and at later times. I came to Him in His timing which was precise because it was His.

“Do not be afraid, for I am with you;
I will bring your children from the east
and gather you from the west.
I will say to the north, ‘Give them up!’
and to the south, ‘Do not hold them back.’
Bring my sons from afar
and my daughters from the ends of the earth—
everyone who is called by my name,
whom I created for my glory,
whom I formed and made (Is.43:5-7).”