Just about six months ago I was sitting in my office in Washington when I received a call from our District Superintendent, Lou Shockley. "How would you like to be pastor of a church?" he asked. I sputtered no, I couldn't do that, I already had commitments to two other jobs. "No, I didn't mean full time," he said. "You'd be working with someone else. Just a couple of months." After a pause, I told him "Yes." And what a couple of months it's been!

And now this phase of St. James' life is ending and a new phase is about to begin. As my time with you ends I first want to take a minute and look back over our time together these six months.

I've gotten to know many of you. Six months ago you were a sea of friendly strangers in front of me. Now your faces are familiar and I know many of you by name.

We've had some good worship services together. Many of us have been in committee meetings together. A few meetings we worried about and they didn't turn out as badly as we feared. I can look back and smile at a couple of things I did that were really smart-and a couple of other things that weren't smart at all. I know I've helped some people-and hurt others. Participating in the choir has been a treat - if you can sing at all, you're missing a treat by not being in the choir. And they can use basses!

There were divisions in the congregation when Bob and I arrived and while I think some healing has taken place, there are still divisions. I've tried to understand the issues involved without focusing on the people involved. I know of people who won't talk with each other and that makes me sad. I hope that healing can continue. Issues can be solved or negotiated or compromised, but people have to be listened to and respected and loved. When we forget that, we've forgotten the heart of the church.

You have been a gift to me these past six months. I was deeply wounded as a pastor 30 years ago, and it has been here, being a pastor again for the first time since then, that I've discovered how much those wounds have healed and how much I've enjoyed being with you in this role of interim co-pastor. These six months have awakened in me a desire to do more of this. In a year, after I finished my current responsibilities, perhaps I will seek out more interim pastor roles with other congregations, on a full time basis for a full year at a time. If I do, I will send you my thanks for being channels of God's call. And I thank you now for all that you have meant to me these six months.

But the most important thing is to look ahead. Next week will be Bob's last day in the pulpit and then Doug Hoffman will be leading your worship as your pastor. The number one responsibility of anyone in an interim role is to smooth the way for the next appointed pastor. That has been Bob's goal and mine for the last six months, and so I want to take these last few minutes in the pulpit to talk about "The Care and Feeding of Clergy".

When we talk about the care and feeding of something, we're usually talking about animals. Taking care of animals means we make sure they have enough air, food, shelter and exercise. But by our actions we take care of people too, and we should want to take care of people at least as well as we take care of animals. There are four things people need which parallel air, food, shelter and exercise. Strangely enough, just because we want to admire them, the care and feeding of clergy is harder than it is for others.

The first need is truth. Truth is to our souls what air is to our bodies -- our most basic need. Jesus said, 'You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free." A person who can't tell truth from falsehood is not sane. If you want to literally drive someone crazy-- find a way to deprive that person of the truth of reality around them. Sometimes our respect for pastors makes it harder for them to learn how things actually are. A pastor needs to know not only what's going on but also how people are feeling - and there needs to be the relationship of respect and caring where such information can be helpfully conveyed.

Supervisors are given the rule - praise publicly, criticize privately. That rule works in churches too - truth about something wonderful needs to be spread far and wide; critical truth should go only to the person who can do something about it.

A second need is relationship. What food is to our bodies, relationship is to our souls. We are social beings. Without relationships, we shrivel up. Statistically, people without significant relationships die younger. Ministers need relationships as much as anyone else, but they can be difficult in a church. Sometimes because we want to admire clergy, we don't allow them to simply be human beings. Other times, however, people think that because someone is an employee, they are simply servants, who should always say yes to whatever they are asked. In St. John's Gospel, Jesus says "You are no longer servants, but friends." If you want to care for your next pastor, be willing to be friends, be willing to be a place your pastor can be at home and be comfortable.

A third need is privacy. Just as shelter protects our bodies, privacy protects our souls. Having boundaries is an important part of knowing who we are. Our houses have walls not just to keep the rain out, but so that we know where the world stops and we begin. The ministry can be a 24-7 kind of thing because one is always on call, and if a member of the congregation has a terrible crisis in the middle of the night the pastor wants to be there. But a pastor who loses any sense of where he stops and the church begins is on the road to a fast burn out.

A pastor's family needs privacy as well, and the same freedom everyone else has to choose how best to contribute to the church. But sometimes, a pastor's family can't win-- if a pastor's spouse is very active in the church, people may be resentful because the spouse has a special access to the pastor that others don't have. On the other hand, if the spouse is not active, he or she can be seen as a negative reflection on the pastor. "I mean, if he can't even get his own family to come to church ..."

A fourth need is accomplishment. What exercise is to our bodies, accomplishment is to our souls. In the best jobs, the nature of the work is clear and feedback regarding whether or not we are accomplishing something is quick. Clergy need feelings of accomplishment, too, but will they get it? How do you know the real impact of a given sermon? Counseling session? Meeting? Prayer? How should a pastor's time be focused? There is never enough. Spend an extra hour on a sermon and skip the hospital visit? Make the hospital visit and skip the time with the children at home?

Differing expectations can keep a pastor from feeling accomplishment. Some of us imagine that on God's stage, God wrote the script, the pastor is the star performer-and the congregation is the audience. But one of our basic Protestant principles is the ministry of the whole people of God, the laity. If you believe that, then the true picture is that the whole congregation are the performers, the pastor is the coach - and God is the audience whose applause we seek. The role of the pastor is not so much to do special things nobody else can do, but to give the whole congregation professional coaching in the things everyone must do.

One of the greatest pitfalls in the relationship of pastor and congregation is having great expectations but no actual plans or accountability. Because no pastor can meet all the expectations that are out there, that's a recipe for failure. No matter what the pastor does, it will always be possible to complain that he is not doing something else. If you don't focus the expectations, you'll set it up so the pastor doesn't stand a chance.

Sometimes in novels we see clergy portrayed as unattractive people, unctuous, impenetrable, petty, lazy, dishonest. Sometimes we meet clergy who are that way. It's jolting to realize that for the most part they didn't enter seminary that way. It's the result of slow starvation over the years, the result of not being fed in the areas of truth, relationship, privacy or accomplishment.

The care and feeding of clergy is a two way street. We can't nourish our clergy if we ourselves are unfed.

There is an old story -- I'm sure it has shown up in many sermons - about a woman who had a chance to be shown hell and heaven. Taken to hell first, she saw an enormous banquet room with every wonderful kind of food you could imagine. "How can this be hell?" she asked. "Look at the people," she was told. Then she saw them: thin, emaciated, starving, bitter, their arms were kept straight by eternal splints that kept them from feeding at this great banquet. "That is truly hell," she thought.

Then she was taken to heaven. Amazed, she found herself in an identical room, with similar tables, similar treasures of the palate. To her surprise, the people here too had their arms in splints, but they were happy and well-nourished. Incredulous, she asked,

"what makes the difference?' "Look closer," she was told. And then she saw the difference between hell and heaven: the outward circumstances were just the same, but in heaven they had discovered that they could feed each other.

It is through grace that we can nourish each other. And one way you can tell if we aren't being nourished is when we have to be right about things.

Let me elaborate a little. Having to be right isn't just a matter of having the truth about something. Having to be right is thinking that we have the truth about something and having no room for anyone else to think differently. When I am into being right, people around me experience me as a real pain in the neck.

The need to be right is a natural consequence of our intelligence and our values. We all have this need. But when we insist on our rightness, we are trying to feed ourselves at the expense of others. Inevitably, we blame other people. Rightness becomes self-righteousness, self-justification. We can get so absorbed in our rightness that we don't even care what happens to anyone else.

The Bible recognizes this and takes it seriously. On Good Friday, the Pharisees got to be right, the Sanhedrin got to be right, Herod and Pontius Pilate got to be right, all the crowd got to be right--and Jesus got to be put to death on the Cross.

Read the newspaper. Wherever people are dying at the hands of other people, you can find someone insisting on being right. In Northern Ireland Catholics and Protestants are "right". In Palestine Israeli Jews and Palestinian Moslems and Christians are "right'. In Afghanistan last week the Taliban out of being right destroyed priceless statues thousands of years old.

Because we are human, there is not one of us who doesn't have in our inner being some piece that will leave others bleeding so we can be right, and that will get in the way of anything we try to do as a church, including the care and feeding of our pastor.

The Good News of the New Testament is the word of grace that we don't have to be right. The very core of classical Christian teaching is that in fact we can't be right on our own -- but God gave us righteousness as a free gift through Christ's self-sacrifice on the cross.

We can let go of that need to be right and receive God's acceptance as a gift. The phrase used by St. Paul in the second chapter of Ephesians is "Justification by Grace through Faith." That means being made right by God, as a gift, because of our relationship to God. Martin Luther put that at the very center of the Protestant Reformation. If we let go trying to be right, we can have the rightness we crave by God's grace -- in the form of forgiveness and acceptance and affirmation by God.

The next time any of us has an impulse to blame someone for something, we need to treat that impulse as a red flag, a warning about our own condition. Are we insisting on being right to someone else's detriment? If so, we are leaving a gift from God behind at the banquet table, and spiritually starving ourselves to death instead.

When we accept the gift of God's grace, it flows through all our relationships. It is no accident that "grace" and "graciousness" are related words. God's answer to our need to be right keeps open the possibility of our being gracious people in a gracious church.

That is essential to all the other things we do in the care and feeding of our clergy. That is the essential element that will make it all work.

May the grace of God be with you today and in all the days ahead.