Working the Angles

The Shape of Pastoral Integrity

Eugene H. Peterson

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 1989
• ISBN:
  9781467419185
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Ministère chrétien

American pastors, says Eugene Peterson, are abandoning their posts at an alarming rate. They are not leaving their churches and getting other jobs. Instead, they have become "a company of shopkeepers, and the shops they keep are churches." Pastors and the communities they serve have become preoccupied with image and standing, with administration, measurable success, sociological impact, and economic viability. In Working the Angles, Peterson calls the attention of his fellow pastors to three basic acts--which he sees as the three angles of a triangle--that are so critical to the pastoral ministry that they determine the shape of everything else. The acts--prayer, reading Scripture, and giving spiritual direction--are acts of attention to God in three different contexts: oneself, the community of faith, and another person. Only by being attentive to these three critical acts, says Peterson, can pastors fulfill their prime responsibility of keeping the religious community attentive to God. Written out of the author's own experience as pastor of a "single pastor church, " this well-written, provocative book will be stimulating reading for lay Christians and pastors alike.

First Angle

PRAYER

I

Greek Stories and Hebrew Prayers

THE SHEER quantity of wreckage around us is appalling: 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, we build quick mental and emotional defenses against the inrush of bad news, and we try to keep our hopes up. And then some kind of crash or other 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 that are exempt from the general carnage? It doesn’t seem so.

Pastors walk into and through these ruins every day. Why do we do it? And what do we hope to accomplish in the ruins? After all these centuries things don’t seem to have gotten much better; do we think that another day’s effort is going to stay the avalanche to doomsday? Why do we all not become cynics at last? 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 the bad news?

Is our talk of a kingdom of God within and among us and our citizenship in it anything that can be construed as the “real world”? Or are we passing on a kind of 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 into something manageable within 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 us to want to repair and fix what is wrong; the secular mind makes for a steady, unrelenting pressure to readjust our conviction of what pastoral work is so that we respond to the appalling conditions around us in terms that make sense to those who are appalled.

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 a little 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, “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 in it. We believe that everything, especially everything that looks like wreckage, is material that 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, of adults who once made love and plans, of believers who once brought their doubts and sang their praises in church—and sinned. We don’t see the dancers or the lovers or the singers—at best we see 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 a 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 that it happened the way Ezekiel preached it and we believe that it still happens. We believe it happened in Israel and that it happens in the church. We believe that we are 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 that 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 that we are launched on a difficult and dangerous act of faith, and that there are strong influences intent on diluting or destroying it. We want you to help us: be our pastor, a minister of word and sacrament, in the middle of this world’s life. Minister with word and sacrament to us 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 that you are launched on the same difficult belief venture in the same dangerous world as we are. We know that your emotions are as fickle as ours, and that your mind can play the same tricks on you as ours. That is why we are going to ordain you and why we are going to exact a vow from you. We know that there are going to be days and months, maybe even years, when we won’t feel like we are believing anything and won’t want to hear it from you. And we know that 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 that you will be unable to respond to the siren voices. There are a lot of 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 basic terms with which we are working, 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 to the people whom it ordains to be its pastors.

Still, no matter how impressive the ritual, no matter how sincerely the vows are given, we keep trying to untie the cords that lash us to the mast. Some of us manage to get loose and respond to other demands. When the people around us forget the terms of our ordination, forget why they asked us to be pastors in the first place, and urgently try to involve us in their newest project, we begin to lose confidence in the authority of our own hard trade. We feel left out of the mainstream and then attempt to cure our sense of exclusion, obscurity, and frustration by plunging into an action that will “make a difference.”

Is there anything to be done about it, some one thing that will keep us at what we set out to do and were set apart to do? If we polled our pastor colleagues, as someone every now and then does, we would get a variety of responses. One response—which would be in predictably short supply, though—would be “prayer.” I don’t mean that the poll would show that pastors do not pray, but rather that they don’t view prayer as the central and essential act that keeps pastoral work true to itself, centered in word and sacrament. What, though, if we extended our poll to all our pastor predecessors and asked them, “What is the most important pastoral act for maintaining your identity?” G. K. Chesterton said that tradition is the only true democracy because it means giving a vote to your ancestors.¹ If we count only the votes of those who happen to be on their feet at this moment, we are letting a small minority make the decision, and a not very distinguished minority at that. Chesterton argued for extending the franchise to the cemeteries. When we do that the ballots naming “prayer” come in with an overwhelming majority. For the majority of the Christian centuries most pastors have been convinced that prayer is the central and essential act for maintaining the essential shape of the ministry to which they were ordained.

Why is this century of pastors not voting with the majority? Have conditions changed so much in our age that prayer is no longer fit to be the formative act? Have developments in theology shown other things to be central and prayer at the periphery? Or have we let ourselves be distracted, diverted, and seduced? I think we have. And I think there is a story that shows how it happened.

When we attempt to orient ourselves in reality, we can rarely do better than go to the Greeks for help. The Greeks lived passionately and intelligently. They tried to understand what it means to live in a world in which things are always going wrong. With their marvelous imaginations they put their understanding into stories. The Greeks were the best storytellers the world has ever known. We keep telling their stories to each other to locate ourselves in the human condition. The stories of Odysseus and Achilles, of Oedipus and Electra, of Narcissus and Sisyphus are diagnostic as we try to get our bearings and keep our balance. The story that helps us understand the loss of prayer in pastoral work is the story of Prometheus.

Aeschylus tells this story best.² According to him the essential characteristic of the human being in the early days of the race was that each person knew the day of his or her death. That is to say, we knew our limits. Mortality was not a vague apprehension but a fixed date on the calendar. In such a condition and with such knowledge there was no incentive to do much more than exist. On top of that, the gods were capricious and brutal. They had the knowledge of how things worked and the means to accomplish them, but they shared neither their knowledge nor their means. They were neither generous nor fair. They held all the significant cards in their own hands. So what is the use of trying? The basic human experience is of mortality and tyranny.

Prometheus, one of the gods, somehow became compassionately concerned about our plight and correspondingly angry at Zeus, the chief of the gods. He took it upon himself to do something about changing the human condition for the better. He did three things that would make a difference. First, he “caused mortals to cease foreseeing doom.” That is, he took away the knowledge of the day of death, the sense of limits, the awareness of mortality. Freed from a debilitating sense of doom, the human now could attempt anything. Second, he “placed in them blind hopes.” Prometheus instilled incentive in men and women to be more than they were, to reach out, to stretch themselves, to be ambitious. But the incentives were blind and directionless, unrelated to any reality. And third, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity. With this gift, people were able to cook food, make weapons, fire pottery. The entire world of technology opened up.

By this act, Prometheus set us on the way we have continued: unmindful of limits, setting goals unrelated to the actual conditions of our humanity, and possessing the technical means to change the conditions under which we live. We don’t have to put up with things as they are. Things can be better; we have the means to accomplish whatever we want to do. Fire provided the energy that became technology—the machine. Consequently, we humans don’t know that we are human; rather, we think we are gods and act like gods. The awareness of our mortality is lost to us. A sensitivity to the results of our actions is lost to us. That would not be so bad if we did not have fire, the technical means to act out our illusions of divinity. As it is we have the technology of the gods without the wisdom of the gods, without the foresight of the gods.

Zeus, of course, was furious. He punished Prometheus by chaining him to a rock in a remote mountain, exposed to the scorching sun and the cold moon. Every day vultures attacked him, tearing at his innards, eating his liver. Each night the liver would grow back, ready for the next day’s rapacious assault. Prometheus is unrepentant. He has brought fire to humankind. He is defiant. He suffers. The story is tragic. The bringing of fire, enlightenment, and technology to humankind makes it possible for us to live civilized lives; at the same time it is the source of suffering. The very act that makes it possible for us to rise above our brutish lives is the cause of unimaginable suffering of a new order.

Prometheus: daring, bold, compassionate, intelligent—raising the standard of living, expanding the scope of living, deepening the resources for living. But bound: chained to the rock showing the consequences of trying to improve the human condition by giving us ambition and tools without at the same time giving us foresight and training us in self-knowledge. It is the story of Western ...