Being a pastor has got to be one of the strangest ways to spend one's life. There are days when it seems less like work and more like a hymn - pure praise - but there are many other days when its tough slogging. There are many reasons for this, prominent among them being the fact that (1) my work is never done, (2) that there copious numbers of opportunities to feel a sense of failure (the gap between who we are and who we are called to be is never fully crossed), and (3) the effect of wearing the persona my role requires me to put on so much of the time - I have to put aside my personal feelings and preferences in order to serve well the ones I am called to serve. That's why I was so encouraged this morning when I read the following excerpt from William Willimon's book Pastor:
Much of what I fret over in ministry is God’s business rather than mine. Therefore, I keep preaching, keep teaching, keep at ministry caught up in God’s business more than my own:
‘And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate – but there is no competition –
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.’
(T.S. Eliot, “East Coker” in Four Quartets)
To have faith that God is present, not only in Word and Sacrament, but also in our teaching, visitation, preaching, and congregational care – this keeps pastors going. We work in some mundane, out-of-the-way places, we pastors, but always under the eschatological conviction that we are essential participants in a great cosmic battle in which God is getting back what belongs to God. Large matters are being worked out through our ministry.
I know that such claims seem absurd to the world, but so does the claim that God saves the world in a modest place like Judea, through a crucified rabbi hanging from a tree. Pastors learn to thrive on, to relish and delight in, what seems absurd to the world.
With 'shabby equipment always deteriorating,' but with great hope,
David
- David Funk
- Husband of Kendra Jayne, father of Abigail and Ethan, son of Elmer and Brenda, pastor of ACF... etc. Welcome.
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Hmmm...this fits well with the definition of community I came across this week in "Jayber Crow" (Wendell Berry) which we are currently reading for 'Take and Read' -- want to read a long quote?!
"My vision of the gathered church that had come to me after I became the janitor had been replaced by a vision of the gathered comunity. What I saw now was the community imperfect and irresolute but held together by the frayed and always fraying, incomplete and yet ever-holding bonds of the various sorts of affection. There had maybe never been anybody who had not been loved by somebody, who had been loved by somebody else, and so on and on... It was a community always disappointed in itself, disappointing its members, always trying to contain its divisions and gentle its meanness, always failing and yet always preserving a sort of will toward goodwill. I knew that, in the midst of all the ignorance and error, this was a membership; it was the membership of Port William and of no other place on earth. My vision gathered the community as it never has been and never will be gathered in this world of time, for the community must always be marred by members who are indifferent to it or against it, who are nonetheless its members and may be nonetheless essential to it. And yet I saw them all as somehow perfected, beyond time, by one another's love, compassion, and forgiveness, as it is said we may be perfected by grace."
I really like it.
Be encouraged -- we of course think you are doing an awesome job -- but we know it is not an easy one, so we pray for you all the time....and for your good wife and children who are part of it as well.
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