After missing the Feast of St. Mark (April 25) last week, I was determined not to miss the next major feast. I didn’t have to wait long. The Feast of Sts. Philip and James is a fascinating development of the Western calendar, in that it brings two apostles who only appear together in the lists of the Twelve in the Gospels. Philip has some lines, usually in connection with Andrew and Nathanael. James—sometimes called the Less, sometimes called the son of Alphaeus—doesn’t seem to get any real spotlight.
Philip starts as a disciple of John the Baptist. He is from Bethsaida, just like Simon Peter and Andrew. He is not afraid to ask things of Jesus—whether to get clarity about teaching (“Lord, show us the Father!”) or to press the boundaries of ministry (as he brought the news of the Greeks who wanted to see Jesus).
As for James the Less—who even knows? Traditions are manifold. Some of the early Fathers made him the same as James the Just, the brother of the Lord. Others didn’t. The centuries upon centuries of biblical scholarship have done nothing to illuminate his life and ministry beyond his apostleship.
So these two apostles—the “star student” Philip and very private James—highlight for us that apostleship isn’t the same as fame, and discipleship isn’t legacy, nor will long association with Church leadership open the doorway to everyone sharing your story. In other words, the Church commemorates these two apostles by entering a state of retroactive imposter syndrome.
I don’t mean totally on their own. Nobody goes looking for it, but many ministers will be able to tell a story of imposter syndrome, and I am no exception. The weight of it hit early for me. Tangled up in the mess of spiritual abuse, Graduating college, I had achieved something—my dad was the proudest I had ever seen him. I was “the first Ketter to get a college degree.” It was a milestone, without much more than the paper to show for it. I had no prospects of marriage (the official mark of adulthood in the family). I had no car. I was unemployed, except for the summer (as an RA and groundskeeper for the college), and wasn’t done with school—when churches refused to interview me, and seminary costs seemed prohibitive, I dove for what seemed accessible—a graduate program at Geneva. I moved off campus at the end of the summer, a quiet unnoticed transition to “real” adulthood, and worked on campus with international students. While continuing at the church plant (in walking distance), I was ready to return to the Assemblies of God, to Pentecostal ministry. My sojourn in abusive churches was over, and the Anglican Church was a house of healing in preparation for the future.
As I finished that year of grad school, my priest sent me off to seminary (on scholarship, or I never would have gone). It was my first immersive experience with the Anglican tradition, and the culture of things beyond our little student-dominated church plant. At Evening Prayer at the end of that first semester, we prayed “Stir up thy power, O Lord, and with great might come among us...” No sooner were these words said than I felt the Holy Spirit just fall on me. If we weren't already kneeling, I would have had to hit my knees. My hands were shaking and my thoughts were overwhelmed with the reality of God’s presence. It felt like an anointing. I wasn't sure for what. I kept praying. When the service was over, I went back to praying for a few minutes and the image that came to my mind was a picture of me in a black shirt and white collar. I pushed it out of my mind. It wasn't on my agenda. I was dead set on getting ordained as a Pentecostal because I'd already decided I wasn’t Anglican.
The first thing I did was pray, give it all over to God. I got out my white board—I wrote down all the things I love about the Assemblies of God and things that would need to be overcome in doing ministry there. I did the same for the Anglican church. The more I looked at it. The more I prayed. The more I realized that what I genuinely wanted was to join the Anglicans. I talked to my parents. I talked to my grandparents. What was emerging, whether or not we were entirely comfortable with the idea initially, was that for all intents and purposes, it seemed like the Anglican church was actually the way to go. Mike cautioned me that ordination was not a guarantee, and that I’d be taking a risk in submitting to the Church. But I couldn’t imagine leaving that congregation, who had offered grace and healing so freely. So, three months later, I was presented to Bishop Duncan for confirmation, and I remember him telling me: go get together with your Presbyterian and Pentecostal friends—build the bridges.
Many of them were at the seminary, as it turned out. When Bishop Duncan visited for his own presentation and preaching at the seminary six weeks later, I remember distinctly his words to us, “Many of you need to be prepared for bivocational ministry.” It was as if he was addressing me, and I made the decision—I wasn’t leaving seminary, but if I was taking the pastoral call seriously, I needed to finish what I had started at Geneva, both in ministry and in education. The next two years put before me all kinds of things I expected—church history, Hebrew, Greek, theology, and pastoral theology, alongside a healthy dose of higher education, student development, and campus ministry—and a few things I did not, like mentorship, affirmation of my leadership in worship and gifts that God had given me, burnout on academia (as I finished my MA in Higher Ed during my middler year), an adoptive Nigerian father in Bishop Kwashi, and a spiritual mother.
I remember that when I met “Mama Martha,” there were no introductions. No handshakes. No “Where are you from?” small talk. I simply became her charge. She came to know me as I grew up, as I learned to have my own voice, and walk on my own. As for me, I could only trust her from the beginning and learn how to return her love. Seamlessly. I don’t even remember thinking that there was anything the least bit strange about it, but as I tell this story, it dawns on me how fundamentally odd it is. At the same time, we don’t remember learning to trust our mothers when we were children, so perhaps it isn’t at all strange.
Nearly every way I had conceived of pastoral ministry had been affected by her example and victoriously-concluded conversations. She had me over for dinner and I learned that hospitality is not just a good plate of food and making people feel at home, but inviting them to become the hosts and share their lives while I receive from them. She drove me around while she ran errands and I learned that there is always time for those you are pastoring, even when there isn’t. She yelled at me enough that I took myself seriously and laughed at me enough to know I needed to lighten up and just be myself.
She came at an important time. As my priest took a call out of state, I was left without oversight and without someone who believed in my own calling to ordained ministry. When the priest-in-charge met with me, he quite frankly delivered his judgment, “I don’t see it.” He called my field experience supervisor and informed him of the conversation. When my supervisor offered a different perspective, the priest-in-charge said, “Well, you can have him.”
Traded without my own knowledge, I offered my own report the next week and was told in simple terms, “We need a church planter; you need a parish.” It was a gracious, broad welcome—no conditions, no tests, no proof. And I found a home at Church of the Savior in Ambridge. I thought I had everything I needed—community in school, community in church.
But it wasn’t just onward and upward. Besides the difficulties of a community that faced massive transition in those first two years, I found I was being called on to dig deep and do a lot of work. I had learned to name dysfunction in seminary, but now I had to identify it and let God do healing—work that came about in therapy, my rector’s mentorship, CPE, and a few hard deaths—including the death of Mama Martha. The last time I saw her, in the fall of 2014, she celebrated my acceptance as an aspirant in the Diocese. It represented the fruits of her fights as much as it did my own. She hugged me, pulled me back and crossed my forehead, and then my hands, and with one hand on my head and the other holding my hand, she prayed—words of blessing, provision, joy, and love and, in all things, a bold witness to the Gospel of grace and ferocious defense of Jesus’ Bride. When she finished her prayer, she hugged me again and said, “You have a dear, mighty heart, my son, and I love you.”
The grace in that prayer followed me, and it was a blessing I returned to frequently in the next year and a half. When the Commission on Ministry was ambivalent the first postulancy interview, I remembered and retold the stories about the Welsh evangelist, and Jeremy, and Mama Martha, and the priest-in-charge. I learned to recount my childhood dreams of being Moses and Elijah. I began rediscovering myself, who God had made me—a through-and-through Yinzer, with more Irish than was good for him, and not enough class to make it on his own in the Anglican world. When I watched as half the Village Church ministry team faded and 90% of our congregation was evicted from their homes, I returned to the memory of a plucky group of a dozen that had invited me to church, to hear Comfortable Words, and have a seat at the Table in a kind of spiritual rehab.
I wrestled with what it meant to be “successful” in ministry. As the ministry team dwindled to other calls and demands of life, and as evictions eviscerated our attendance, I had to confront the fear that I was failing. But I couldn’t hear God say we were done, and neither could my rector. As the leadership of Church of the Savior continued to say that we should press on, maintain presence, and stay there until God said otherwise, I learned (and not for the last time) that fruitful ministry had little to do with what I could see and everything to do with holding space for God to do His work. And that had a lot to do with Jason’s return. After graduation, he had moved to be near family in Western NY. For 18 months, we lived our separate lives, ministries, and relationships. As 2015 was coming to a close, the impossibility of my situation was pressing me from every side. And my best friend upended his entire life in Western NY to come back to Pittsburgh and help me.
When the ministry regained its footing, and we had children clamoring for baptism, I went back to the Commission, and back to the Bishop, and watched as God opened door after door for my ordination to the diaconate—the last set of diaconal ordinations that Bishop Duncan would do. As I stood there with a group of church planters and chaplains, I could only marvel at the work of God, and barely keep on my knees when the Spirit fell at the ordination prayer. God was keeping his promises.
When you grow up Pentecostal, there's a lot in the air about the promises of God, “praying the promises”, and things of that nature. Then you try and live it, and the bright-eyed expectations of your fervent naivete comes face to face with the sludge of life. In the best cases, rather than persistent naivete or depressed mires, you hit up on rock-hard shores of faith. Because despite all, the shores of repentance provide the ground of God's “yes.” Not the “yes” to all the “Daddy, can we get’s” of our misdirected loves, but the “Yes, you're beloved. Yes, you're accepted. Yes, you're forgiven. Yes, you're known. Yes, you're secure. Yes, you're Mine” of a Triune God. The promises of God are indeed fulfilled and given to His people, graciously, lavishly, and abundantly--and those promises come in the shape of a union and relationship grounded in repentance, that longing for God to restore wholeness, sanity, identity, and love. A longing fulfilled--a tree of life.
Death was a regular feature in that first year of ordained ministry, as a I led the bereaved six different times, culminating in the funeral of my dad’s stepfather. That funeral, just twelve days after my ordination to the priesthood, was my first act as a priest for my family. It enacted the words that had been preached over me just days before by my friend Jonathan Martin,
This is a different choice that you’re making, Dave, becoming a priest. For so many of us, we get into God’s presence—all our junk is illumined—and we shrink away. And yet, here are these individuals so ridiculous that they can have all of that exposed—have their guts turned inside out, everything that’s in darkness brought into light—and instead of screaming in terror, they say, “Okay, if you cleanse me now, if you can send me out and do something with this, I will go; I will do that.” …You are going to be a sheep, sent out among the wolves…so much of the road that you’re on has to do with staying open—keeping your heart open, to people, open to God, open to what’s happening in the world—knowing that it’s going to mean profound hurt. And that often, coming closer to the heart of God means, instead of that tenderness, that ache, becoming less so, it becomes more so. It’s a painful thing to carry the presence of God in the world.
If my story and my struggle have taught me anything, it is that we ministers are all Philip and James. We are all earnest, and engaged, and looking for the Kingdom of God…but we are also neglected, overlooked, forgotten—not only in the pages of history, but in the intersecting paths of everyday life, where people don’t know what to make of us. In those moments, it is the mothering and fathering of mature believers, and the sacrificial co-laboring of brothers and sisters in Christ, that enable us to hear afresh the Word of God, to be united in a life like his, to overwhelm the imposition of wondering if you’re real enough to survive the reality of your collar.
Philip is associated with two loaves of bread in the shape of a cross. James often features a gourd filled with water. These everyday items are filled with necessity. They point to the reality of what we need: we NEED sustenance and life that are provided in these simple items. And because we serve the God of Cana, we know that the gift of the forgotten in a hollowed out gourd goes from water to wine, and together Philip and James—and by God’s grace, me—can bring a meal for the life of the world.