Being the Minister that I Am

I have moved further down the coast and spent last night with my dear friends Conner and Haniah. Today we are driving down to the Keys where I will don my clerical robe, over a pair of shorts and perform a wedding ceremony in my bare feet. Sort of Jesus Christ meets Jimmy Buffett!

Then again I have never been a conventional cleric. I never been conventional about much anything. But when it comes to religion, I believe that God wants us all to help one another out as best we can. Treat everybody else like you want to be treated pretty much sums up what Jesus had to say about living life.

And that is what I have tried to do. I haven't relied on institutional expressions of religion to do this because I have come to believe that treating others as you want to be treated happens when people actually interact with one another. Singing hymns, passing the peace, doing communion, and listen to someone expound for 20 minutes are not particularly germane to treating others as you want to be treated. Not that there is anything wrong with these things, or that I don't enjoy them from time to time, but that I find God when I am interfacing directly with others.

There are a lot of people who seem to prefer a minister who doesn't bring institutional stuff with me. So I get asked a lot to do weddings and funerals for people who believe in God and the Spirit but not so much in the church. So they get in touch with me. And I pick and choose how when I want to participate.

I am doing this wedding because Conner asked me to do it. I would do much anything for Conner as I know without a doubt that he would do anything for me. When my Dad died last summer they drove all of the way from Pampano Beach to Savannah just for the funeral. And there is a holiness to this kind of interaction between two people.

So that is the kind of minister that I am. It is all about what happens between two or three people at a time. Not necessarily all of that other stuff. And I think that God likes ceremonies in the cathedral that God built, which is this world, more than inside some musty building with stained glass windows.