We are gathered for the fourteenth annual general chapter retreat of the Society of the Holy Trinity. I welcome you once again to St. Mary of the Lake University here in Mundelein. You come here from throughout the United States and Canada and represent several Lutheran church bodies. I dare say that our Society’s general retreat is one of the most inter-Lutheran gatherings in North American Lutheranism. We respect our differences but celebrate what we hold in common, including our call and ordination as Lutheran pastors and our confessional commitments.

We retreat in order to withdraw for a time from our daily ministries in order to be renewed in the exercise of the Holy Office of the Ministry. A retreat is not a vacation. It is a holy work of renewal in our vocation by engaging in prayer, learning, mutual conversation and consolation, individual confession and forgiveness, and by hearing the word of God and sharing as far as conscience allows the Holy Communion.

A retreat is also not a convention or even a conference. As our general retreat has increased in attendance (this year we expect more than 200 of us here) it has become more difficult to avoid the character of a convention or a conference. We have to be disciplined in our behavior in order to maintain the character of a spiritual retreat.
I mention three matters in particular.

First, there is the discipline of intentionality. We have come here to do certain things both as a Society and as individual members, and we have to move with dispatch as we transition from the chapel to the refectory to the plenary room and back to the chapel, because a group of a couple hundred people cannot move quickly. I try not to make the schedule too jam-packed, but some times are not negotiable. We need to stagger our presence in the refectory, especially at breakfast, with that of the seminarians who also eat there. Nor are the times of prayer negotiable; that’s the nature of the liturgy of the hours.

Second, there is the discipline of silence. We don’t need to be talking and glad-handing all the time. We don’t need to have our cell phones and other devices on. And we should not have them on during worship or teaching sessions. I implore you to maintain silence especially as you enter and leave the chapel. Some come into this space to pray or remain after services to meditate. Let us respect that. In fact, I would encourage us not to talk at all until we are outside the building or down in the parlor, since the sound of our voices carries through the halls.

Third, there is the discipline of community. Our Society aims at consensus in all things, even in worship. We need to suppress our individuality. I exhort you not to try to lead worship from your seats. We have to say this every year, but it’s a hard habit to break. You are all pastors used to being in the chancel and leading your congregations in worship. But we have a pastor for this retreat, and it is not you. Please listen to one another and sing softly until you catch the pace of the psalms and the tempos of the hymns as those are set by our chaplain or cantor. Directions have been included in the worship orders. Please read and follow them. We may not be doing things the way you or I are used to doing them. The psalms may not be sung the same way every time in every office. Please pay attention.

Another discipline we observe in retreat is the ordering of the word of God in the lectionaries. We have invited colleagues to preach at the daily prayer offices, in which we follow the two-year daily lectionary of the Lutheran Book of Worship and The Book of Common Prayer. This lectionary can land you in parts of the Bible you haven’t preached on before. The discipline of the daily lectionary stretches us homiletically. Nevertheless, the Holy Spirit can use every text of Scripture to speak to us in areas where we need to be spoken to.

So, now to the homiletical portion of this address.

I was assigned the reading you have heard from the First Book of Kings for this Tuesday in the Fifteenth Week after Pentecost. It’s the story of the transition in the office of Israelite kingship from David to Solomon. David is aging and ailing and needs to designate his successor and arrange for the transference of power.

This story actually hit me existentially because I’m at that point in my pastoral career in which I am thinking about retirement. Some of you have already been through the process of retiring and some others among you, like me, are facing it sooner rather than later. I’ve been working with a retirement counselor from the ELCA Board of Pensions. That has eased my financial anxieties.

I’m also not too worried about having something to do in retirement. My decisions are more likely to be about what I will not be doing. Retirement for clergy does not really have to be about ending ministry; it can be about a change of ministry — receiving another call. In a sense it is a transition from one call to another. I know some of you are contemplating a change in calls from one ministry to another.

What retirement really means is resigning from one’s present call, not from the Holy Ministry. In my case this means resigning as pastor of the congregation I have served for the last twenty-one years. Since retirement usually has a flexibility about it, when is the best time to do that? Is there ever a best time to leave a parish? Do I help the congregation with its transition? Or do I just say, it’s your future, I won’t be a part of it, so you’ll have to do what seems good to you and the Holy Spirit, with whatever assistance the synod bishop’s office can provide?

Leaving any congregation for a different call also means cutting ties with close friends. But the ELCA policy is that the pastor and his family have to leave the parish he or she has served, whether one is transitioning into retirement or into another parish. I think it’s an appropriate policy. You have to get out of the way of your successor. You are no longer called to that pastoral office and you have to respect the pastor who is called to it. David did that for Solomon by joining his ancestors. That’s not necessarily how any of us want to get our of the way of our successor. But this also suggests that resigning pastor should not play a role in choosing his or her successor. Actually, in a previous parish long ago I recommended my successor and it proved to be a disaster. Why? Because I really wanted to maintain my ministry when I left that congregation, and by my interference I obstructed the work of the Holy Spirit in leading that congregation in a new and necessary direction.

In a sense, David didn’t choose his successor. Now since it looks like he did, I need to unpack that statement. Here’s the situation. David has approached old age with the succession still in doubt. Perhaps he was simply trusting God’s promise that his dynasty would be eternal without worrying about the details. But others were worried about the details because the pool of candidates had been reduced by the deaths of Amnon and Absolom and the apparent death of Chileab. Adonijah is David’s oldest surviving son. Well, there was Solomon, but he was only twenty years old, and the political gurus all felt that a seasoned hand was needed on the tiller of state. Adonijah thought he was the logical choice to be David’s successor and so did General Joab, Abiathar the high priest, and other leading figures in the royal administration.

Before questions could be raised about the succession, Adonijah went through the ritual of offering a whole burnt offering and inviting almost everyone of importance to the event. Conspicuously left off the guest list were his half brother Solomon, Zadok the other high priest, Benaiah the commander of David’s household guards, and, perhaps most importantly, Nathan the prophet, who had proclaimed the word of the Lord certifying the eternal validity of David’s throne.

These important players immediately sprang into action. Nathan’s plan was to obtain the throne for Solomon. Perhaps he had some sense that Solomon was also God’s choice. We don’t know because Nathan’s reasons are never stated in the narrative. But the man of God is not above enlisting David’s wife Bathsheba to remind the ailing king of a promise he made to her to have their son Solomon succeed him, although this oath is also not recorded in the Books of Samuel or Kings. As Bathsheba was pleading the case for her son, Nathan entered the chamber and informed David of what Adonijah was doing and how the people were all shouting “Long live the king.”

The aging lion of Judah summoned his energy and sprang into action. He summoned Bathsheba back into his chamber, declared that Solomon shall succeed him, and summoned Zadok the priest to anoint his son as king of Israel. It is noteworthy that Solomon himself had not been conspicuously a part of the plot. But now he is set on David’s royal mule and paraded to the Israelite equivalent of Westminster Abbey to be anointed and proclaimed as king in David’s place.

David was needed to authorize the succession because, ailing or not, he was the government. But one has the impression that without the interference of Nathan, perhaps acting under God’s orders (just as Samuel had been acting under God’s orders when David himself was anointed to replace Saul), the succession of Solomon would not have occurred. The intention of David, made in a promise to Bathesheba, was apparently not widely enough known to keep Adonijah from asserting his position and important people from going along with him. It was a messy transaction, to say the least, much as our call processes can be messy.

It may appear that David was choosing his successor. But this would be incorrect because neither David nor Solomon was the real king of the Israel. This was not just the death of one king and the rise of another. The psalms proclaim over and over again that “the Lord is king.” David and Solomon were office holders. They served in persona regnum, as it were – “in the role of the king.” But Yahweh was the true king.

Certainly you want the right person in that role, just as you want the right person holding the office of pastor. There has to be some discernment about candidates, and Nathan had apparently done that discerning. We engage in discernment in our call processes. But the ministry of Christ in his Church continues no matter who holds the office of pastor. As the Lord God was the true king of Israel, so the true head of the new Israel, the Church, is Christ. So in a sense there is no transition in leadership as the office is passed from one person to the next. The ministry of Christ continues in the Church even as pastors come and go.

When David’s time came to “go the way of all the earth,” he charged King Solomon: “Be strong, be courageous, and keep the charge of the Lord your God, walking in his ways and keeping his statutes, his commandments, his ordinances, and his testimonies, as it is written in the law of Moses.”