Take all that you have and be poor: Practice Resurrection Stories
My parents sometime around the years they met in Bible college in the late 1960’s and were married in 1970.
“Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
anymore. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.”
In 1977 my father quit his job as a pastor to take up pastoring for free.
My father had been thinking about the gifts of the Spirit and reading about the old-timey preachers spreading sawdust with one hand and turning Bible pages with the other. He was a youth pastor in a proper church where he grew up, married my mother on the carpeted platform, and swung off the wooden balcony for a VBS stunt. He’d talked with a youth pastor at another proper church in town about joining together to reach the local high schoolers. The deacons at his church thought mixing denominations would confuse their youth, and send mixed messages about important doctrines like eternal salvation. They preferred to stay separate from other doctrines, thank you very much.
“You can be our Visitation Pastor instead of our Youth Pastor”, they said. “You can visit the people who send their rowdy kids to Sunday School on the church bus. While you’re at it, visit the sick, homebound church members,” they said.
My dad would’ve been a good Visitation Pastor if it weren’t for the living room full of neighbors showing up for Bible Study at our house each week. They were asking the same uncomfortable questions as my Dad. They needed a place to go to church a little less concerned about keeping denominations separate and a little bit more concerned about keeping people together body and soul. Our living room became their church instead.
We had a red and blue plaid couch in place of the long wooden pews and a creaky black rocking chair draped with a yarn afghan crocheted by my great grandmother. Instead of stained glass windows, we had grey paneled walls and the orange and burgundy wallpaper my mother hung in the dining room. We had white muslin curtains with ball fringe ties my mother sewed for the windows. We had Ethan Allen bookcases, a desk, a black and white television with a bent-over antenna tottering on an old TV tray.
This room gathered the most surprising mix of congregants. New Christians, disillusioned Christians, fake Christians met in that living room for Bible Study. When my Dad left his job at the old church the began meeting on Sundays too. We were a house church before that was trendy. Some friends and family joined the neighbors and we figured out how to be a church together. My uncle brought his guitar, but he picked his favorite Psalms from the Bible and wrote tunes to them since he didn't know any hymns. We all memorized them together. My favorite was the one from Habakkuk about the fig tree without blossoms and the stalls without herds.
Soon a couple of the neighbor families with much larger living rooms invited us to use their houses on Sunday mornings instead. They had houses like the Brady Bunch and worked at companies that paid actual salaries like IBM. We’d sit in the sunken living rooms, sing songs, and listen to a message my Dad would speak from a dining room chair. Sometimes the kids would go into a bedroom or a family room on the bottom floor of the split level and listen to Bible stories like a Sunday School class. On Easter, we walked the backyard of the farmer in our group, watched the sunrise, and then sat around card tables in the basement eating pancakes with New York maple syrup.
My earliest memories of church are actually full of wonder. I knew what was happening was unusual - people who didn’t know Jesus deciding to follow Jesus and to invite their friends and family to know Jesus and worship together in someone’s living room might’ve been normal in certain times and places but not for anyone else I knew. Church in my earliest memories is vibrant, if not a bit chaotic, and easy to think of in terms of resurrection life.
My Dad pastored the house church for free and drove a school bus, sold vacuum cleaners, painted houses, and pressed apple cider for money. At Christmas my brother and sister and I hung up his grey hunting socks from a window sill, hoping for surprises. That was the same year a kind lady in our church -- the lady who lived in the Brady Bunch house -- sewed my sister and me matching Holly Hobby bathrobes.
In the old church, my brother and I got to run around in the darkened rooms during the middle of the week when no one was there but my Dad and the other pastors. We missed playing hide and seek in the nursery baby beds bolted upper bunk and lower bunk like train cars on the painted cinder block walls. But we felt the adventure of building a new church of people. We watched with interest as each piece of liturgy took shape week after week - my grandparents who took it upon themselves to purchase a dozen or so hymnals, the woman with food allergies providing special communion bread each month, Dad selecting just the right riverbank for baptisms.
I was baptized in the river in one of the local parks where he chose. Our church was mobile enough to hold Sunday morning service in the picnic pavilion next to the water. If the rain hadn’t turned it to mud, the congregation situated on a grassy bank while Dad waded hip-deep to dunk parishioners. I was twelve the summer he baptized me in the Susquehanna River. My two older cousins and I in our t-shirts and cut-off shorts proclaimed to our congregation and the three guys zooming by on jet skis that we belonged to Jesus and his church and we were proud to let the world know it.
Somewhere around this time, by the grace of God and the compassionate mercy of one of the baby boomer corporate executives that were sometimes drawn to the start-up feeling of our little Bible church, the congregation organized themselves enough to pay my father an actual salary. With benefits. And a retirement plan. And paid vacation days. If I had the power vested in me, I’d make this guy a saint.
Every once in a while I try to imagine if that day had never arrived. I try to guess how far my parents’ scrappy work ethic, picking up every job offered to them - from school bus driving to waiting tables while caring for 6 children and a small but clamoring congregation, would’ve carried us.
I know many people live their entire lives in the reality of no predictable salary or benefits. May God bless and keep them and make his face shine upon them because that kind of insecurity is traumatic. The kind of low-grade trauma that sneaks up on you and makes you do strange things like when you’re afraid the chocolate chip cookie you bake are the last ones you’ll ever eat so you hide them in your gym bag and nibble on them a bit every day in the school coatroom. (Ask me how I know.)
For me, that trauma became enmeshed with church growth. The math in the kind of poverty my parents chose is pretty simple. People come to church and throw a bit into the offering plate and we have groceries this week. People don’t come to church - because they’re out of town or sick or peeved by the sermon my Dad preached last week - and we don’t have groceries this week. You can see how that might make a pastor’s kid insecure.
In the years of no salary, we collected stories now turned into family legend, not unlike the missionary tales we used to hear in Sunday School. The kind of stories that come with their own posterboard-book illustrations where the teacher turns the pages and children sit cross-legged on the floor in mild unbelief that someone could pray for food for an entire orphanage and the next minute a stranger knocks on the door to deliver pounds of free potatoes. We gasped in awe that God would provide free potatoes just because someone prayed. Still, there are only so many ways to prepare potatoes. We never get to that part of the story.
By some lucky break of the housing economy, my parents were able to buy a home before my father started working for free. When a third child arrived creating a need for Mom to turn the walk-in closet into a nursery they realized we were going to need something bigger (never dreaming at that time, that 3 more children would eventually arrive by birth and adoption to complete our family. Yes, my parents are the kind who both work for free and give up every bit of future inheritance to welcome a preschooler with no permanent home into our forever family.)
But the new house, the one with enough bedrooms (and another walk-in closet that will once again become a nursery when my youngest brother arrives) is old and drafty. My uncle, an amateur blacksmith, welds us a wood stove to help heat the place because the cost of keeping the oil furnace filled might bankrupt us. One particularly bad winter, when both income and heating fuel were down to the last drops my parents moved all of us into the living room to sleep. That red and blue plaid couch that served as a pew for our first parishioners also held a hide-a-bed. My mother tucked us in with the afghans from my great-grandmother around the woodstove my Uncle built and tried to keep us warm for the night. One or more of us has a bad cold and the coughing keeps us awake if the drafty house doesn’t. My father stokes the fire and then settles into the creaky rocking chair to pray. My parents pray for heating fuel, for money to purchase cough syrup, and, to get to the drug store, enough cash to top off the empty gas tank in our car (which was, in my memory, perpetually running on empty).
You guys, this isn’t a Dickens tale. This is my actual life.
This is where the resurrection part happens. While Dad creaks in the black rocking chair, stoking the woodstove, the phone rings. It feels like it’s the middle of the night but during winter in New York, probably more like 8 pm. A man from our church - another one with a corporate-type income and God’s mercy in his heart - says “I think God just told me you need some money?”
This is the kind of resurrection my parents would practice over and over and over again. It’s the kind of resurrection I’m praying for them as they approach their mid-seventies and are both still working.
Poverty isn’t a virtue. Like death, poverty is an outcome of broken systems in a broken world. Sometimes poverty is the result of broken people making foolish choices. Sometimes, though, living on the lower rungs of the income ladder is the outcome of radical, costly obedience. Salary and retirement plans, notwithstanding, my parents took all they had (which was poor for starters) and became poor over and over and over again. They did this in response to Jesus’ invitation to carry his cross, which is always costly. There’s no way for resurrection to happen unless the cross comes first.
Despite God’s evident provision in my childhood, as it became my turn to make vocational decisions I decided I’d never live on a pastor’s income. When Brian and I got engaged he changed his Bible college student status to an education major and we prepared to live the steady, secure life funded by a teacher’s salary. (That’s one of the little jokes in this great comedy of God’s calling on our lives.) Brian grew up the youngest of five children being raised by a single mom. His story makes my parents look like the Rockefellers by comparison. (If you ask, he can describe the distinct flavor profile of powdered milk.)
We began our marriage with $200 leftover from the cash we received as wedding gifts and enough furniture to fit in an open-air trailer hitched to the back of my cousin’s pickup truck. The name Clampett might come to your mind, but we felt like freshly-appointed kings. Our car was our one debt and it was a beauty. Brian had worked in a used-car lot and got a sweet deal on a silver Buick Skylark. We drove it from New York to Virginia one month after our wedding to begin the life of married college students. At first, we lived in a kind family’s basement, watching the beginning reports of the first Iraq war on the late news each night. After the news, they’d head upstairs to bed leaving alone in the family room (with no door) to sleep on their pull-out sofa.
Within a few weeks, we found a lovely apartment a twenty-minute drive from campus and the Buick Skylark would transport us back and forth to early-morning classes and then again late at midnight to pick Brian up from his second shift job. We learned to buffer our commute time in the morning with enough extra minutes for me to step out of the car on the side of the road to deal with morning sickness from our completely unexpected (and totally welcomed) immediate pregnancy. The car was our lifeline to school and work and the one or two friends we knew around town - all of them about twenty miles from our door.
And then one night Brian was driving home late from work and the car didn’t make it home. A kind cop helped him out and we eeked out hard-earned cash to pay for the tow truck. A blown head gasket was the diagnosis and $900 was the estimated bill.
Now we were stuck. There was no public transportation coming out this far into the country and without transportation, how would we make it to school, our jobs, or prenatal visits? The $200 buffer we started with had dwindled to living paycheck to paycheck. We were stuck and we were scared. No matter how much our parents loved us, we knew they would also be unable to help us. We cried and fought and then remembered the Internal Revenue Service promised to send us some money because that’s the side of the American economic equation we lived. In a certain number of weeks, we learned they’d be sending us - you guessed it - $900. Now, all we had to solve was transportation until we could pay the bill for our car.
This is the part of the story where the resurrection happens.
On the same day, we met our new upstairs neighbors. In my memory, we were walking by their front door wiping tears from our eyes and they met us on the pathway with golden sunlight haloing their heads. I’m sure it wasn’t exactly like that, but I like my version. A young couple offered a friendly hello and within minutes we learned three things about them:
He was attending the same school we attended and had roughly the same class schedule.
He was working a second-shift job in the same general direction as Brian’s workplace.
They would become our new best friends in one of the loneliest seasons of our lives.
If I had the power, I’d give this couple sainthood right along with the man who introduced the novel idea to pay the pastor, my dad, a salary for his labor.
By the end of the semester, less naive and more pregnant, we realized how much we needed the support of our families nearby. To pay for a UHaul trailer to get our stuff back to New York, we cashed in a couple of savings bonds I’d been given as a kid as payment for my fifth-grade side hustle as a children’s television news reporter. (That’s a story for another day). Our neighbor friends helped load the trailer and we hitched our worldly goods to the bumper of that beautiful Buick Skylark and headed north for home.
After the hard knocks of our first six months of marriage, we considered ourselves permanently planted in central New York state. For generations, both Brian’s and my family had lived in the same small collection of towns in the center of New York state. We moved between towns several times as our family grew and Brian’s work as a teacher shifted to college faculty and then church staff. It never crossed our minds we’d need to live anywhere else until my husband’s job was downsized in 2010. Since the early 1980s, the economy wobbled in our little post-industrial part of the northeast, but with Brian’s graduate degree and job experience it never occurred to us we’d have to look anywhere else for work.
Looking back, I’m not positive what came first: Brian’s agonizing vocational discontent or the economic recession that tipped our area’s quaky economy over the edge. Either way, we found ourselves with four kids, ages 12 - 18, and only my part-time church income. After our severance ran out, Brian picked up a job as a long-term substitute high school teacher in the district that had given him his first job back in 1996. It was a backward career move for certain and it required I pick up the cross I’d long been avoiding. I’d managed to pretend that the church staff job Brian had wasn’t actually the pastor’s life I’d vowed to never choose. After all, he was part of a multi-pastor staff in a megachurch. It wasn’t even close to the same thing as the living room church my Dad started.
That painful year proved to be invaluable for Brian’s sense of calling and purpose. The lesson was priceless and it cost every bit of tiny savings we’d managed to set aside up to that point.
Practicing resurrection is inextricably intertwined with some kind of death - to self, to world systems that diminish life, or to life itself. Saying yes to God’s calling for Brian to become ordained as a pastor cost us more than we ever expected. I mean “costly” in so many intangible ways: long distance from family and friends, unfamiliar cities, and exhausting cross-country moves. But I also mean “costly” in a technical and literal way. Following God’s call has cost us every dollar and financial asset we owned.
When I look back on our journey with this in mind, God seems almost insistent that our family develop the skill of mobility. That’s not to say we’ve never made a wrong move, nor is it to blame our occasional poor financial decisions on God! It is to recognize the unexpected gifts we’ve received along this crooked pilgrimage. With each move, I’ve tried to get lighter, hold onto fewer things, and let go of my inborn fear of scarcity. I don’t need to hoard the cereal boxes or the leftover scraps of dryer sheets or every piece of furniture a friend offers for free. Still, God continues to invite me to loosen my grip on the things I’d grab instead of dying to my fear to live in the spaciousness of resurrection.
God has asked us - the Brian and Tamara Murphy family - to the same simple-math stewardship He called my parents to live. I’m learning to not only be grateful but to embrace the abundance of His care for us in the process. Without a smidgen of shame, I want our children and grandchildren to know that we have followed God with abandon on this downwardly mobile path. At times, we have done it badly, always trying to learn what financial stewardship means in each place and season of life. Imperfectly, and sometimes ungratefully, we have depleted every bank account, sold every asset, used up retirement, while simultaneously, and ferociously waged battle against recurring debt. Unless the Lord builds the house, we may never have one to call our own.
There have been seasons of our journey that we’ve been able to pull a healthy, double income, and seasons when we’ve lived off one part-time income. We recently completed a season of my vocational journey where we pay for continuing education for me without me bringing in income. This mobility God’s required of us has made us scrappy and resourceful. While we’ve usually had jobs that earned us enough to fit the description of the middlest of the middle class, we haven’t always had those jobs. We’ve also cleaned houses and corporate offices and cars, We’ve delivered pizzas and poured coffee from behind a counter at 7 AM. All of this work was and is good. We’ve been uniquely trained for this work by our industrious parents and grandparents, and we’re grateful for their example.
We also do not take for granted the privileges automatically afforded us at birth by the sheer happenstance of our dominant-culture ethnicity and family networks. We’ve always been wealthy in relationships and community. We receive these assets with open hands and pray God will multiply them beyond our own children across the socio-economic, racial, and national borders of our lives.
Along the way, we’ve also received more care than can be accounted for from our community. Brian’s seminary degree, donations made to my tuition, jobs, and gifts for our kids, and a massive investment of prayer and encouragement from those around us all belong to the overflow of the goodness of God and neighbors. This is the abundance I’m discovering in downward mobility. It’s an unexpected, unlimited return with an unexpected, limited cost. It is God’s manna for this winding, unexpected pilgrimage.
This is the resurrection we’re all invited to practice right now on earth as it is in heaven. Whatever intangible costs Jesus (or Wendell Berry) means when he says to give all that we have to become poor, he at least means money - dollars, investments, assets, inheritances, and transferring of wealth. I’m as prone to greed as anyone - hoarding my little stashes and fantasies of getting the most for the least. The good news is that there’s always more I can give away. I don’t know if Mr. Berry would say so, but I know that Jesus did. Practicing this kind of resurrection means becoming nothing so that our reward is Christ himself. The math in this equation astounds us.
In the meantime, I’ve begun the spiritual practice of thanking God for the homes that other people own. The ones I visit and the ones I drive by as I wander through Connecticut. I believe each pang of longing is a reminder that we are made for homes and beauty, and that one day we will welcome each other across the thresholds of eternal dwellings not made by human hands. We’ll bask forever in the abundance of our God through Jesus who made himself nothing, descended into complete poverty, and submitted to death and was resurrected and ascended back to the Father’s presence so that he could share the riches of his inheritance with us all as sons and daughters of God. This is the only true economy worth our investment. It costs more than we ever expect and rewards more than we ever imagine.
Thank you, Mom and Dad, for making this our inheritance. Brian and I hope to give our children the same.
2010, Celebrating their 40th anniversary.