#1 by eleven72
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And then another kind of crash puts us or someone we care about in a pile of wreckage. Newspapers document the ruins with photographs and headlines. Our own hearts and journals fill in the details. Are there any promises, any hopes exempt from the general carnage? It doesn't seem so.
Pastors walk into these ruins every day. Why do we do it? What do we hope to accomplish? After all these centuries, things don't seem to have gotten much better; do we think another day's effort is going to stay the avalanche to doomsday? Why do we not all become cynics? Is it sheer naiveté that keeps some pastors investing themselves in acts of compassion, inviting people to a life of sacrifice, suffering abuse in order to witness to the truth, stubbornly repeating an old, hard-to-believe, and much-denied story of good news in the midst of bad news?
Is our talk of citizenship in a kingdom of God anything that can be construed as the "real world"? Or are we passing on a spiritual fiction analogous to the science fictions that fantasize a better world than we will ever live in? Is pastoral work mostly a matter of putting plastic flowers in people's drab lives—well-intentioned attempts to brighten a bad scene, not totally without use, but not real in any substantive or living sense?
Many people think so, and most pastors have moments when they think so. If we think so often enough, we slowly but inexorably begin to adopt the majority opinion and shape our work to the expectations of a people for whom God is not so much a person as a legend, who suppose that the kingdom will be wonderful once we get past Armageddon, but we had best work right now on the terms that this world gives us, and who think that the Good News is nice—the way greeting card verse is nice—but in no way necessary to everyday life in the way that a computer manual or a job description is.
Two facts: the general environment of wreckage provides daily and powerful stimuli to make us want to repair and fix what is wrong; the secular mindset, in which God/kingdom/gospel are not counted as primary, living realities, is constantly seeping into our imaginations. The combination—ruined world, secular mind—makes for a steady, unrelenting pressure to readjust our conviction of what pastoral work is. We're tempted to respond to the appalling conditions around us in terms that make sense to those who are appalled.
Word. But in the wreckage, all words sound like "mere words."
Sacrament. But in the wreckage, what difference can water, a piece of bread, a sip of wine make?
Yet century after century, Christians continue to take certain persons in their communities, set them apart, and say, "You are our shepherd. Lead us to Christlikeness."
Yes, their actions will often speak different expectations, but in the deeper regions of the soul, the unspoken desire is for more than someone doing a religious job. If the unspoken were uttered, it would sound like this:
"We want you to be responsible for saying and acting among us what we believe about God and kingdom and gospel. We believe that the Holy Spirit is among us and within us. We believe that God's Spirit continues to hover over the chaos of the world's evil and our sin, shaping a new creation and new creatures. We believe that God is not a spectator, in turn amused and alarmed at the wreckage of world history, but a participant.
"We believe that the invisible is more important than the visible at any one single moment and in any single event that we choose to examine. We believe that everything, especially everything that looks like wreckage, is material God is using to make a praising life.
"We believe all this, but we don't see it. We see, like Ezekiel, dismembered skeletons whitened under a pitiless Babylonian sun. We see a lot of bones that once were laughing and dancing children, adults who once aired their doubts and sang their praises in church—and sinned. We don't see the dancers or the lovers or the singers—or at best catch only fleeting glimpses of them. What we see are bones. Dry bones. We see sin and judgment on the sin. That is what it looks like. It looked that way to Ezekiel; it looks that way to anyone with eyes to see and brain to think; and it looks that way to us.
"But we believe something else. We believe in the coming together of these bones into connected, sinewed, muscled human beings who speak and sing and laugh and work and believe and bless their God. We believe it happened the way Ezekiel preached it, and we believe it still happens. We believe it happened in Israel and that it happens in church. We believe we are a part of the happening as we sing our praises, listen believingly to God's Word, receive the new life of Christ in the sacraments. We believe the most significant thing that happens or can happen is that we are no longer dismembered but are remembered into the resurrection body of Christ.
"We need help in keeping our beliefs sharp and accurate and intact. We don't trust ourselves; our emotions seduce us into infidelities. We know we are launched on a difficult and dangerous act of faith, and there are strong influences intent on diluting or destroying it. We want you to give us help. Be our pastor, a minister of Word and sacrament in the middle of this world's life. Minister with Word and sacrament in all the different parts and stages of our lives—in our work and play, with our children and our parents, at birth and death, in our celebrations and sorrows, on those days when morning breaks over us in a wash of sunshine, and those other days that are all drizzle. This isn't the only task in the life of faith, but it is your task. We will find someone else to do the other important and essential tasks. This is yours: Word and sacrament.
"One more thing: We are going to ordain you to this ministry, and we want your vow that you will stick to it. This is not a temporary job assignment but a way of life that we need lived out in our community. We know you are launched on the same difficult belief venture in the same dangerous world as we are. We know your emotions are as fickle as ours, and your mind is as tricky as ours. That is why we are going to ordain you and why we are going to exact a vow from you. We know there will be days and months, maybe even years, when we won't feel like believing anything and won't want to hear it from you. And we know there will be days and weeks and maybe even years when you won't feel like saying it. It doesn't matter. Do it. You are ordained to this ministry, vowed to it.
"There may be times when we come to you as a committee or delegation and demand that you tell us something else than what we are telling you now. Promise right now that you won't give in to what we demand of you. You are not the minister of our changing desires, or our time-conditioned understanding of our needs, or our secularized hopes for something better. With these vows of ordination we are lashing you fast to the mast of Word and sacrament so you will be unable to respond to the siren voices.
"There are many other things to be done in this wrecked world, and we are going to be doing at least some of them, but if we don't know the foundational realities with which we are dealing—God, kingdom, gospel—we are going to end up living futile, fantasy lives. Your task is to keep telling the basic story, representing the presence of the Spirit, insisting on the priority of God, speaking the biblical words of command and promise and invitation."
That, or something very much like that, is what I understand the church to say—even when the people cannot articulate it—to the individuals it ordains to be its pastors.
The world vs The Pastor
Entering the Wreckage
An illusion-bashing orientation helps. Take a long look at the sheer quantity of wreckage around us—wrecked bodies, wrecked marriages, wrecked careers, wrecked plans, wrecked families, wrecked alliances, wrecked friendships, wrecked prosperity. We avert our eyes. We try not to dwell on it. We whistle in the dark. We wake up in the morning hoping for health and love, justice and success; build quick mental and emotional defenses against the inrush of bad news; and try to keep our hopes up.And then another kind of crash puts us or someone we care about in a pile of wreckage. Newspapers document the ruins with photographs and headlines. Our own hearts and journals fill in the details. Are there any promises, any hopes exempt from the general carnage? It doesn't seem so.
Pastors walk into these ruins every day. Why do we do it? What do we hope to accomplish? After all these centuries, things don't seem to have gotten much better; do we think another day's effort is going to stay the avalanche to doomsday? Why do we not all become cynics? Is it sheer naiveté that keeps some pastors investing themselves in acts of compassion, inviting people to a life of sacrifice, suffering abuse in order to witness to the truth, stubbornly repeating an old, hard-to-believe, and much-denied story of good news in the midst of bad news?
Is our talk of citizenship in a kingdom of God anything that can be construed as the "real world"? Or are we passing on a spiritual fiction analogous to the science fictions that fantasize a better world than we will ever live in? Is pastoral work mostly a matter of putting plastic flowers in people's drab lives—well-intentioned attempts to brighten a bad scene, not totally without use, but not real in any substantive or living sense?
Many people think so, and most pastors have moments when they think so. If we think so often enough, we slowly but inexorably begin to adopt the majority opinion and shape our work to the expectations of a people for whom God is not so much a person as a legend, who suppose that the kingdom will be wonderful once we get past Armageddon, but we had best work right now on the terms that this world gives us, and who think that the Good News is nice—the way greeting card verse is nice—but in no way necessary to everyday life in the way that a computer manual or a job description is.
Two facts: the general environment of wreckage provides daily and powerful stimuli to make us want to repair and fix what is wrong; the secular mindset, in which God/kingdom/gospel are not counted as primary, living realities, is constantly seeping into our imaginations. The combination—ruined world, secular mind—makes for a steady, unrelenting pressure to readjust our conviction of what pastoral work is. We're tempted to respond to the appalling conditions around us in terms that make sense to those who are appalled.
Ministering as People Set Apart
The definition that pastors start out with, given to us in our ordination, is that pastoral work is a ministry of Word and sacrament.Word. But in the wreckage, all words sound like "mere words."
Sacrament. But in the wreckage, what difference can water, a piece of bread, a sip of wine make?
Yet century after century, Christians continue to take certain persons in their communities, set them apart, and say, "You are our shepherd. Lead us to Christlikeness."
Yes, their actions will often speak different expectations, but in the deeper regions of the soul, the unspoken desire is for more than someone doing a religious job. If the unspoken were uttered, it would sound like this:
"We want you to be responsible for saying and acting among us what we believe about God and kingdom and gospel. We believe that the Holy Spirit is among us and within us. We believe that God's Spirit continues to hover over the chaos of the world's evil and our sin, shaping a new creation and new creatures. We believe that God is not a spectator, in turn amused and alarmed at the wreckage of world history, but a participant.
"We believe that the invisible is more important than the visible at any one single moment and in any single event that we choose to examine. We believe that everything, especially everything that looks like wreckage, is material God is using to make a praising life.
"We believe all this, but we don't see it. We see, like Ezekiel, dismembered skeletons whitened under a pitiless Babylonian sun. We see a lot of bones that once were laughing and dancing children, adults who once aired their doubts and sang their praises in church—and sinned. We don't see the dancers or the lovers or the singers—or at best catch only fleeting glimpses of them. What we see are bones. Dry bones. We see sin and judgment on the sin. That is what it looks like. It looked that way to Ezekiel; it looks that way to anyone with eyes to see and brain to think; and it looks that way to us.
"But we believe something else. We believe in the coming together of these bones into connected, sinewed, muscled human beings who speak and sing and laugh and work and believe and bless their God. We believe it happened the way Ezekiel preached it, and we believe it still happens. We believe it happened in Israel and that it happens in church. We believe we are a part of the happening as we sing our praises, listen believingly to God's Word, receive the new life of Christ in the sacraments. We believe the most significant thing that happens or can happen is that we are no longer dismembered but are remembered into the resurrection body of Christ.
"We need help in keeping our beliefs sharp and accurate and intact. We don't trust ourselves; our emotions seduce us into infidelities. We know we are launched on a difficult and dangerous act of faith, and there are strong influences intent on diluting or destroying it. We want you to give us help. Be our pastor, a minister of Word and sacrament in the middle of this world's life. Minister with Word and sacrament in all the different parts and stages of our lives—in our work and play, with our children and our parents, at birth and death, in our celebrations and sorrows, on those days when morning breaks over us in a wash of sunshine, and those other days that are all drizzle. This isn't the only task in the life of faith, but it is your task. We will find someone else to do the other important and essential tasks. This is yours: Word and sacrament.
"One more thing: We are going to ordain you to this ministry, and we want your vow that you will stick to it. This is not a temporary job assignment but a way of life that we need lived out in our community. We know you are launched on the same difficult belief venture in the same dangerous world as we are. We know your emotions are as fickle as ours, and your mind is as tricky as ours. That is why we are going to ordain you and why we are going to exact a vow from you. We know there will be days and months, maybe even years, when we won't feel like believing anything and won't want to hear it from you. And we know there will be days and weeks and maybe even years when you won't feel like saying it. It doesn't matter. Do it. You are ordained to this ministry, vowed to it.
"There may be times when we come to you as a committee or delegation and demand that you tell us something else than what we are telling you now. Promise right now that you won't give in to what we demand of you. You are not the minister of our changing desires, or our time-conditioned understanding of our needs, or our secularized hopes for something better. With these vows of ordination we are lashing you fast to the mast of Word and sacrament so you will be unable to respond to the siren voices.
"There are many other things to be done in this wrecked world, and we are going to be doing at least some of them, but if we don't know the foundational realities with which we are dealing—God, kingdom, gospel—we are going to end up living futile, fantasy lives. Your task is to keep telling the basic story, representing the presence of the Spirit, insisting on the priority of God, speaking the biblical words of command and promise and invitation."
That, or something very much like that, is what I understand the church to say—even when the people cannot articulate it—to the individuals it ordains to be its pastors.
- #1 Prayer Illustration - eleven72
- #2 Jewish Prayer
- #3 Prayer Struggle
#2 by FortyOne Twenty
#3 by Beamer Films
A Prayer To Guide Us by Centerline New Media
Video on Worship House Media
Lily's
influence
influence
The Lord has used my wife's love for God to influence my walk with the Lord more than anyone else, but we need to walk a lot further because a great deal of work continues to be needed.
Dr. MaryKate Morse of George Fox Evangelical Seminary is probably second. The Lord used her to turn me a direction I never knew existed. Other than a couple of minor edits below is a paper I wrote for my Seminary prayer class in December of 2005. It was my second semester in Seminary. Seminary was not what I expected. Dr. MarkKate Morse was the Prayer class professor. I had no idea the impact she would have, still continues to have, on my journey with the Lord.
The videos below are a sampling of the world of prayer.
The latter part of August I heard a Rabbi say if we would promise God to do something at the same time every day, for the rest of our life, and do it, no matter how small, it would change us. George Fox works hard to teach its students that we need to like ourselves before we can really like anyone else. I understand the psychological red flags of what I am about to say, but even now, four years later, I still don't agree with that thesis. It has always been easy for me to see the good in others exceeding any good there might be in myself. After reflecting on what the Rabbi said and having just finished To Pray As A Jew by Rabbi Hayim Halevy Donin, I once more began a process I hoped would bring about a change in me for the better.
Earlier that summer I took Quaker Polity with Dr. Carole Spencer and immersed myself in Fox and Barclay. Donin made for a real contrast. These two approaches to God, although quite different, fascinated me, although admittedly, I am most at home with structure and lists.
Surprises, even good surprises are difficult for me, but I enjoy them once they are over. It is that feeling of helplessness during the unexpected that is uncomfortable. Yes, I prefer to drive rather than ride, regardless of whose car it is and regardless of who is driving.
Praying in a small group led to an unexpected intimacy. I learned that people can share heart burdens that make me want to run. Those unexpected encounters with suffering are what real prayer is all about. I always need the LORD, but when someone else's sorrow fills my heart I especially need the LORD to quiet my spirit. I used to worry about not knowing what to say to someone whose heart was breaking. Now I know it isn't necessary for me to speak unless I'm given something to say.
In his book Donin wrote that a pius Jew would read Psalms 145-150 every day before prayer, just to get in the right attitude. I promised the LORD that this is what I would do every day at 5 am for the rest of my life. I had started these kind of projects before only to find that I couldn't fast one day so certainly not forty days. Reading this in the approaching summer of 2009 I note that I no longer get up at 5 and even though I have made reading those Psalms an early morning routine, it does not happen every day.
Those first three weeks were difficult, but that Prayer Class helped me stick with it. I had to have a closer walk with the LORD if I was going to survive the prayer sessions with the three ladies I had been grouped with.
I started writing down prayers for people and reading these after I finished my Psalm ritual. This was great because it kept me from praying for the things I wanted. As my list grew longer I found more and more people and their situations coming to my mind instead of my usual financial fears about the future.
After a couple of months I noticed a kind of satisfaction developing in me. I eventually recognized this as pride that I was still following through with my promise. One morning I felt like God just wanted me to be still. This was a real issue because I had my routine and I kept track of my consecutive mornings and I was now in the seventies. I felt like God was asking me if my routine was the main reason why I was getting up or if it was to be with my LORD.
Sheepishly and reluctantly I did not turn on my laptop. I sat still for ninety minutes, but I had no revelation and I did not hear God say anything. Still, I felt like I had made some kind of personal breakthrough, though I had no idea what that might be.
My mornings became and still are very precious to me, despite no breakthroughs. Some of my prayers were answered and many were not. Mostly I still do my routine, but every now and then I will feel like I am just supposed to be still or just read scripture. Some days I stay in bed and pray the Lord's prayer and wonder if the Lord will show me how I am to use this day of life I have been given. I wait expectantly and so far all I can say is that I still wait expectantly, not knowing exactly what I am waiting for, not knowing exactly what I am hoping for, but none the less happy that I am waiting. As usual, when I am all finished my little clipboard has empty sheets of paper on it.
MaryKate's Prayer class showed me it is quite alright to use my lists, or read, or pace, or lay across the ottoman downstairs, as long as I don't come to believe that any one or combination of these things is somehow necessary.
I don't see any changes in myself, but my wife says I have changed dramatically. She says I am more relaxed, easy going and attentive. All I know for sure is that when the alarm goes off at five, six now, I get up with an expectancy, as though a friend is waiting for me. Speaking of a friend, my everyday prayer used to be for Godly wisdom, discernment and understanding. I would finish praying by telling God when I die it would be great to hear God say, "Well done, good and faithful servant." Now the desire of my heart is that when I breathe my last I so much want to hear God say, "Welcome home old friend."
Jonah's Prayer
Jonah 2
Jonah 2
"Out of my distress I called to ADONAI,
and he answered me;
from the belly of Sh'ol I cried,
and you heard my voice.
For you threw me into the deep,
into the heart of the seas;
and the flood enveloped me;
all your surging waves passed over me.
I thought, 'I have been banished
from your sight.'
But I will again look at your holy temple.
The water surrounded me, threatened my life;
the deep closed over me,
seaweed twined around my head.
I was going down
to the bottoms of the mountains,
to a land whose bars
would close me in forever;
but you brought me up alive from the pit,
ADONAI, my God!
As my life was ebbing away,
I remembered ADONAI;
and my prayer came in to you,
into your holy temple.
"Those who worship vain idols
give up their source of mercy;
but I, speaking my thanks aloud,
will sacrifice to you;
what I have vowed, I will pay.
Salvation comes from ADONAI!"
Stern, D. H. (1998). Complete Jewish Bible-OE
Prayer Inspiration - Steelehouse Media
Video on Worship House Media
Serenity Prayer by Grove Films
Video On Worship House Media
Lord's Prayer by Crossroads Creative
Video On Worship House Media
Prayer Is An Encounter by Beamer Films
Video on Worship House Media
Pray With Your Feet by Recycle Your Faith
Video on Worship House Media