Sunday, November 21, 2004
Open Letter to a Pastor
I think this letter is on here somewhere
But I felt moved to post it again:
Dear Pastor _____,
Good day to you. I hope that this note finds that you are doing well. Here it is a Friday afternoon, and I am still pondering the message you gave last Sunday morning. You spoke of the things that we should require of a "pastor." You said that he would be Godly, have a good reputation, etc...I believe you even said he should be a Christian.
Then you spoke about, "Go" and moving and finding your niche etc. etc. etc.,
But I didn't hear anything about Grace. I didn't hear the Good News, which is that the only Begotten Son of God became incarnate, lived and died the death I was due, and the life he lived along with his perfect death is now credited to me. That with Jesus in John we can say:
"This is the work of God, that you believe on Him whom He has sent." (John 6:29)
But what usually happens is on the first Sunday, we applaud the Sinner who comes with the prayer of the Tax Collector in his pocket, but expect him, once he becomes a Christian to be able to live and pray like the Pharisee in the parable by the next week
This goes along with the tendency now to suppose that the way to train clergy to be good pastors and/or pastoral counselors is to give them some professional competence in what are usually called the 'helping' professions -- to make them trained psychologists, or knowledgeable hospital visitors, or family-system adepts, or twelve-step experts. I have no objection to such professionalization in and of itself, but I do think that in the rush to become professionals in fields that unordained persons are perfectly capable of handing, the clergy can and do often loose site of their principal competence as counselors -- of their calling to be authentic and authoritative proclaimers of the Gospel, the Good News of God in Christ!
Ordained persons are not commissioned to do certain things for the church that the rest of the church cannot or does not do. Rather, they are ordained as sacraments (best word I could use, sorry to go high church) or as signs to the church of what the whole church is commissioned to do -- namely, bear the apostolic witness to Jesus' death and resurrection. When you go into the pulpit on Easter Day, for example, you should not go as an expert on the scientific or theological possibilities of the resurrection. If you do your job correctly, you do not stand up there and tell the congregation that you have studied the subject and have come up with this, or that conclusion about it. Instead you arrive in the pulpit as the latest in a long line of runners, and you tell them very simply, but very authoritatively, "Peter saw him risen......(pant, pant, pant)....and he told me to tell you." Do you see? when you preach the Good News, you are first of all an apostle, not a theologian or any other king of learned person.
But even then The Good News of what God has done for the world in Jesus, is the exact opposite of what most people, including a lot of preachers, think it is. They think it's some kind of religious recipe for getting their act together -- for solving their problems or straightening up their lives so that God will approve of them and they can approve of themselves. Above all, they think it's about getting rid of the problems of evil and guilt -- about doing something to avoid being judged, whether by God, or by others, or by themselves. But the Gospel isn't anything like that. That's all perfectly intelligible stuff the world has been capable of telling itself --and of driving itself nuts with because none of it is really possible. It's all BAD NEWS not Gospel. Religious recipes seldom get anybody's act together -- and they never get it to the point where it can't be messed up in some new way. Problems that get solved are just replaced with new ones that may never get solved. Approval depends on the approver, not on anything the approvee does: if the approver's standards are high enough, approval never comes. And as far as evil is concerned, whatever it is that God has done in Jesus, he certainly hasn't taken evil out of circulation.
Furthermore, on the face of the Gospel it seems that God isn't the least bit interested in any of that intelligible but pointless stuff. Instead he waltzes into the world and makes the weird announcement that he's simply dropped the whole business. He says he's come not to judge but to save. He says not that he's going to deal with guilt but that because of what he's done, there just isn't any guilt left. He says you can't deal with evil by resisting it, only be forgiving it. He says, in other words, that the whole of the world's habitual way of operating in those departments is upside down. And he says that in Jesus he's made a whole new right-side-up world -- and that that's the only real world, the only one that can be a lasting, happy place.
Our problem of course, is that we're so used to standing on our head, that when he shows up, we think he's the one who's upside down. If the Gospel is proclaimed correctly, therefore, it's always going to sound nuts to us. As a matter of fact, it will always sound wrong, immoral, and threatening to all the values we know and love even though they're killing us. We want a recipe for righteousness and sanctification, not to be told if we believe in Jesus it is done. Not that according to God, even as I struggle with the left over flesh nature, according to him, I'm already seated in the Heavenly Places with Christ.
That and that alone should be the taproot of what it is to be a good pastor. That and that alone should be the reason that anyone is ordained. So that you can proclaim, Christ has died, Christ is Risen, Christ will come again!
Another way would be to look at the Gospel as Jesus is the Ticket Master at a Stadium called Heaven, and all we have to do is get the ticket from Jesus and then we can go inside and join the party....but what is most often presented is that Jesus runs the light company, and has paid the initial installment, but now we are on the monthly plan, complete with access fees (lots of good deeds) to be paid before you can tap into his power, and the threat of a cutoff in service if you didn't keep up the monthly payments with righteous acts.
Anyway, just wanted to share these 'thought's' I had with you.
love you.
Love4theWord
But I felt moved to post it again:
Dear Pastor _____,
Good day to you. I hope that this note finds that you are doing well. Here it is a Friday afternoon, and I am still pondering the message you gave last Sunday morning. You spoke of the things that we should require of a "pastor." You said that he would be Godly, have a good reputation, etc...I believe you even said he should be a Christian.
Then you spoke about, "Go" and moving and finding your niche etc. etc. etc.,
But I didn't hear anything about Grace. I didn't hear the Good News, which is that the only Begotten Son of God became incarnate, lived and died the death I was due, and the life he lived along with his perfect death is now credited to me. That with Jesus in John we can say:
"This is the work of God, that you believe on Him whom He has sent." (John 6:29)
But what usually happens is on the first Sunday, we applaud the Sinner who comes with the prayer of the Tax Collector in his pocket, but expect him, once he becomes a Christian to be able to live and pray like the Pharisee in the parable by the next week
This goes along with the tendency now to suppose that the way to train clergy to be good pastors and/or pastoral counselors is to give them some professional competence in what are usually called the 'helping' professions -- to make them trained psychologists, or knowledgeable hospital visitors, or family-system adepts, or twelve-step experts. I have no objection to such professionalization in and of itself, but I do think that in the rush to become professionals in fields that unordained persons are perfectly capable of handing, the clergy can and do often loose site of their principal competence as counselors -- of their calling to be authentic and authoritative proclaimers of the Gospel, the Good News of God in Christ!
Ordained persons are not commissioned to do certain things for the church that the rest of the church cannot or does not do. Rather, they are ordained as sacraments (best word I could use, sorry to go high church) or as signs to the church of what the whole church is commissioned to do -- namely, bear the apostolic witness to Jesus' death and resurrection. When you go into the pulpit on Easter Day, for example, you should not go as an expert on the scientific or theological possibilities of the resurrection. If you do your job correctly, you do not stand up there and tell the congregation that you have studied the subject and have come up with this, or that conclusion about it. Instead you arrive in the pulpit as the latest in a long line of runners, and you tell them very simply, but very authoritatively, "Peter saw him risen......(pant, pant, pant)....and he told me to tell you." Do you see? when you preach the Good News, you are first of all an apostle, not a theologian or any other king of learned person.
But even then The Good News of what God has done for the world in Jesus, is the exact opposite of what most people, including a lot of preachers, think it is. They think it's some kind of religious recipe for getting their act together -- for solving their problems or straightening up their lives so that God will approve of them and they can approve of themselves. Above all, they think it's about getting rid of the problems of evil and guilt -- about doing something to avoid being judged, whether by God, or by others, or by themselves. But the Gospel isn't anything like that. That's all perfectly intelligible stuff the world has been capable of telling itself --and of driving itself nuts with because none of it is really possible. It's all BAD NEWS not Gospel. Religious recipes seldom get anybody's act together -- and they never get it to the point where it can't be messed up in some new way. Problems that get solved are just replaced with new ones that may never get solved. Approval depends on the approver, not on anything the approvee does: if the approver's standards are high enough, approval never comes. And as far as evil is concerned, whatever it is that God has done in Jesus, he certainly hasn't taken evil out of circulation.
Furthermore, on the face of the Gospel it seems that God isn't the least bit interested in any of that intelligible but pointless stuff. Instead he waltzes into the world and makes the weird announcement that he's simply dropped the whole business. He says he's come not to judge but to save. He says not that he's going to deal with guilt but that because of what he's done, there just isn't any guilt left. He says you can't deal with evil by resisting it, only be forgiving it. He says, in other words, that the whole of the world's habitual way of operating in those departments is upside down. And he says that in Jesus he's made a whole new right-side-up world -- and that that's the only real world, the only one that can be a lasting, happy place.
Our problem of course, is that we're so used to standing on our head, that when he shows up, we think he's the one who's upside down. If the Gospel is proclaimed correctly, therefore, it's always going to sound nuts to us. As a matter of fact, it will always sound wrong, immoral, and threatening to all the values we know and love even though they're killing us. We want a recipe for righteousness and sanctification, not to be told if we believe in Jesus it is done. Not that according to God, even as I struggle with the left over flesh nature, according to him, I'm already seated in the Heavenly Places with Christ.
That and that alone should be the taproot of what it is to be a good pastor. That and that alone should be the reason that anyone is ordained. So that you can proclaim, Christ has died, Christ is Risen, Christ will come again!
Another way would be to look at the Gospel as Jesus is the Ticket Master at a Stadium called Heaven, and all we have to do is get the ticket from Jesus and then we can go inside and join the party....but what is most often presented is that Jesus runs the light company, and has paid the initial installment, but now we are on the monthly plan, complete with access fees (lots of good deeds) to be paid before you can tap into his power, and the threat of a cutoff in service if you didn't keep up the monthly payments with righteous acts.
Anyway, just wanted to share these 'thought's' I had with you.
love you.
Love4theWord
