46 “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord’ and don’t do what I say?
47 I’ll show what it’s like when someone comes to me, hears my words, and puts them into practice.
48 It’s like a person building a house by digging deep and laying the foundation on bedrock. When the flood came, the rising water smashed against that house, but the water couldn’t shake the house because it was well built.
49 But those who don’t put into practice what they hear are like a person who built a house without a foundation. The floodwater smashed against it and it collapsed instantly. It was completely destroyed.” (Common English Bible)
“The Wounded Healer:
Finding Strength in Our Scars,” Week Five
In
the small(ish) world of mainline Christian pastors with social media presences,
Derrick Weston is the friend of a friend whose blog I stumbled across some time
ago for the first time some months ago, when I was linked to an emotionally
honest post of his as he reflected on his time at his first pastorate, a solo
pastor job much like mine, and how he loved the church and its people dearly
but struggled to make the sort of impact that he had felt called by God to make
there. He wrote in part:
Every effort I made to
think through ways of inviting new youth into the church or to develop
programming for young people was met with either indifference or outright
hostility. To make it worse, the loyal young people we did have in the church
were treated very poorly. They were critiqued for what they wore to church.
Their behavior when they stayed in worship was analyzed. They were looked down
upon when they didn’t stay in worship. It was frustrating. How were we supposed
to bring in new young people when we treated the young people we did have like
they were a nuisance? And these were good kids! Really good kids! It pisses me
off to think about some of the things that were said to and about them…
Easter of that year, I
had a panic attack. It took a while for me to realize that that is what it was.
I couldn’t breathe. My chest tightened. I lost my balance. This was before
worship began and continued into the start of the service. I was carrying the
pressure that this might be this church’s last Easter service on me and it was
devastating.
Think
about that for a minute—the inability to change the culture of the church in
ways that both he and they knew desperately needed changing was such a heavy
burden upon him that it caused a panic attack. On Easter, the day most
associated with resurrection and rebirth in the entire calendar.
That
is the sort of loneliness ministry can inflict, and sometimes be about. And it
is the sort of loneliness that can move us to construct a house built without a
foundation like here in Luke 6.
This
is the final week of a sermon series that, believe it or not, has taken us
right now just up to church season of Advent, which is the time we prepare for
Christmas and begins next Sunday, the 27th. Before we arrive at the land of egg
nog and gingerbread, though, we have one more series to undertake together, and
it is based on a formative book which I first read in its entirety when I
arrived here and a colleague and friend of this congregation, Marvin Eckfeldt,
gave to me: The Wounded Healer by Henri Nouwen, a Dutch priest and theologian
who passed away about twenty years ago, but not before leaving behind him a
rich vein of theological and pastoral literature. Though relatively brief as
far as theological treatises go, The Wounded Healer is arguably Nouwen’s magnum
opus: accessible, lucid, poignant, and passionate in its fundamental premise
that only by understanding our own wounds and scars can we as Christians and as
ministers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ then, in turn, heal others of their own
wounds and scars.
The
Wounded Healer is a four-chapter book with a prologue, and we had five weeks in
all, so we spent week on each section, and we finally arrive at the final
chapter, which Nouwen entitled, “Ministry By A Lonely Minister,” and writes in
part in it:
Ministers are called to
speak to the ultimate concerns of life: birth and death, union and separation,
love and hate. They have an urgent desire to give meaning to people’s lives.
But they find themselves standing on the edges of events and only reluctantly
admitted to the spot where the decisions are made…
In the cities, where
children play between buildings and old people die isolated and forgotten, the
protests of priests are hardly taken seriously and their demands hang in the
air like rhetorical questions. Many churches decorated with words announcing
salvation and new life are often little more than parlors who feel quite
comfortable in the old life, and who are not likely to let the minister’s words
change their stone hearts into furnaces where swords can be cast into
plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks.
The painful irony is that
ministers, who want to touch the center of people’s lives, find themselves on
the periphery, often pleading in vain for admission…Our failure to change the
world with our good intentions and sincere actions and our undesired
displacement to the edges of life have made us aware that the wound is still
there.
I
promise this isn’t a “woe is me” message from either Nouwen or myself. What
he—and I—are both lamenting is something far bigger than any one of us: it’s
the willingness of people to set their lives about without that solid bedrock
which Jesus speaks of in the Sermon on the Plain here in Luke 6.
Jesus
is speaking the exact same lament that we are: “Why do you call me ‘Lord,
Lord,” and don’t do what I say?” It’s probably the same lament you had or have
as parents with your kids on occasion: “Why do you call me Mom/Dad and don’t do
what I say?”
And
it is the exact same sort of lament with the church. We pastors who shepherd
the church hear ourselves being called “Pastor, Pastor,” but we really do
lament why more of what we bend over backwards and turn ourselves inside out in
order to teach doesn’t quite seem to land in the fertile soil rather than on the
gravel and the stones where no seeds will easily grow.
A
significant amount of what we teach falls into that category, but one teaching
in particular stands out—to me and, I think, in light of the arc of his book,
to Nouwen as well: the church is still not a welcoming place yet. Not for LGBTQ
seekers, not for people of other faith traditions, and not for young people.
That, in a nutshell, is what causes the sort of emotional and spiritual pain
that leads a pastor like Derrick Weston to a panic attack on Easter Sunday.
For
the lack of welcome in the church can be directly tied to its decline:
millennials are abandoning organized religion in record numbers and believe me,
it isn’t just because we would rather worship at the church of brunch (although
that is certainly a part of it). And it isn’t just because Sunday is now a day
to do all sorts of things as opposed to a day when everything shut down for the
day (although that is certainly a part of it as well).
It
is because with all of those other options in mind, why would we come to a
place for a couple hours on a rare day off to be treated with skepticism,
suspicion, or condescension? Why would any rational person subject themselves
to that sort of subtle hostility when they could be doing any number of other
things that they legitimately enjoy?
In
other words—we here in the church are the ones who are getting in the way of
the Gospel being heard by even more people, and it is because we are acting as
Jesus’s audience did, calling Him Lord but not doing all which He says to do in
terms of providing a radically open welcome to all persons, not just the ones
who dress like us, or fit into our generation, or quite simply look like us.
The
Gospel is not simply for the people who look like us. It is for the people who
do not.
Jesus,
after all, was an Aramaic-speaking Israelite—not an English-speaking American.
He never lived past the age of 33 or so. And He was homeless.
All
of those factors, do you really think if you saw them in someone that it would
make you more inclined to welcome them into the church, or less likely? Be
honest.
That,
in a nutshell, is how we have lost the bedrock that Jesus speaks of here in
Luke 6. It is what we pastors have known for years, and have been pleading with
our churches to understand and embrace the reality of, but like Derrick, many
of us have ended up seeing our pleas fall on plugged-up ears.
Yet
Christ also says, let the one who has ears hear.
So
hear the words of those who minister to you in your life—not just me, but your
family and friends and especially the youth in your life. Do not allow us to
minister to you in loneliness. Allow us to minister to you in vitality, spirit,
truth, and power, in a symbiotic relationship in which each of us is made
better for the other being in their life. Allow us to provide you with that
firm foundation, that solid bedrock of love and mercy, upon which life eternal
through Jesus Christ is predicated.
For
it is in such conditions that the Spirit is known to thrive in us. And forever
may it thrive in our churches, in our lives, and in the kingdom.
May
it be so. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
November
20, 2016
Right to the point, Eric!
ReplyDeleteThanks Marvin!
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