Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work

Eugene H. Peterson

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 1992
• Print ISBN: 9781467403474
• eBook ISBN: 9781467420136
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Whereas much of the current literature on pastoring stresses up-to-date training and new techniques stemming from the behavioral sciences, Eugene Peterson here calls for returning to an "old" resource--the Bible--as the basis for all of pastoral ministry.
Originally published in 1980 and now being reprinted to meet continuing demand,  Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work shows how five Old Testament books provide a solid foundation for much of what a pastor does:
 

• Prayer-Directing: Song of Songs
• Story-Making: Ruth
• Pain-Sharing: Lamentations
• Nay-Saying: Ecclesiastes
• Community-Building: Esther

Pointing to the relevance of ancient wisdom, adapting Jewish religious tradition to contemporary pastoral practice, and affirming a significant link between pastoral work and the act of worship, this book opens up to pastors a wealth of valuable practical-theological insights.

I

The Pastoral Work of Prayer-Directing: Song of Songs

In certain states of romantic love the Holy Spirit has deigned to reveal, as it were, the Christ-hood of two individuals each to other. He is himself the conciliator and it is there that the “conciliation” — and the Reconciliation — begins. But this is possible only because of the Incarnation, because “matter is capable of salvation,” because the anthropos is united with the theos, and because the natural and the supernatural are one Christ.

— Charles Williams¹

SHE CAME TO SEE ME at the recommendation of a friend. She had been troubled for years, seeing psychiatrists seriatim and not getting any better. The consultation had been arranged on the telephone so that when she walked into my study it was a first meeting. Her opening statement was, “Well, I guess you want to know all about my sex life — that’s what they always want to know.” I answered, “If that is what you want to talk about I’ll listen. What I would really be interested in finding out about, though, is your prayer life.”

She didn’t think I was serious, but I was. I was interested in the details of her prayer life for the same reason that her psychiatrists had been interested in the details of her sex life — to find out how she handled intimate relationships. I had to settle for the details of her sex life at that time. Sex was the only language she knew for describing relationships of intimacy. At a later time, when she came to understand herself in relation to a personal God, she also learned to use the language of prayer.

I like to tell the story because it juxtaposes two things that crisscross constantly in pastoral work: sexuality and prayer. And it juxtaposes them in such a way as to show that they are both aspects of a single, created thing: a capacity for intimacy.

Much of pastoral work has to do with nurturing intimacy, that is, developing relationships in which love is successfully expressed and received — shared. The relationships are multiform: between woman and man, husband and wife, parent and child, sisters and brothers, neighbors and acquaintances, employers and employees, friends and enemies, rich and poor, sinners and saints. And, in addition to but also involved in each of these combinations, the person and God. All horizontal relationships between other persons, when they achieve any degree of intimacy at all, are aspects of sexuality. All vertical relationships with persons of the Godhead, when there is any degree of intimacy at all, involve prayer. And since there are never instances of merely horizontal relationships and never any solely vertical relationships — we are created in both directions; there are no one-dimensional beings — both sexuality and prayer (or either sexuality or prayer) can be used to explore and develop personal relationships of intimacy. Either, used thus, involves the other. When we develop and express our love to another person we are using the same words and actions and emotions that also are used to develop and express our love for God; and vice versa.

And so it happens that the person who comes to the pastor because of a difficulty in human relationships is led to a comprehension and understanding of God’s place in our existence, is encouraged in faith and taught to pray. The person who comes to the pastor full of anxiety about a spiritual condition is led to see the connection between God’s will and the other persons who live in the same house or neighborhood or place of work, and learns how to express the connection in acts of forgiveness, of compassion, of affection, of witness, of service.

Pastors are assigned the task of helping persons develop their everyday relationships in such a way that they discover God’s will and love at the center of every encounter. We are also given the correlative task of training persons in mature discipleship so that what is believed in the heart has demonstrable consequences in daily life. In some ways it matters little where you start: with the physical relationships as an analogy of the spiritual or with the spiritual as a model for the personal. Regardless of where you start, it is only a step or two to get from one to the other. Because of the common origin of our creation and redemption, an examination of our sex life leads to an examination of our prayer life and vice versa.²

When pastors leave the pulpits on Sunday, we don’t, overnight, turn into humanists on Monday, our Sunday prayers and preaching serving as only a vague and wispy background for the real work of helping people. Nor do we, during the week, collar all the people we meet and lead them to the altar to “get them right with God.” There are some, of course, who do: who apart from their pulpits, having left all theological ballast behind, plunge with great goodwill into the sea of human need; or who apart from their pulpits are incapacitated for any work at all except that of repeating snatches of their Sunday sermon to whomever they might meet. Biblical pastoral work, though, is not permitted to disfigure ministry with such barbarities.

We live in a whole world of creation and redemption in which all the relationships which stretch along a continuum of sexual identity and spiritual capacity are involved in our daily growth and discipleship. Pastoral work refuses to specialize in earthly or heavenly, human or divine. The pastor is given a catholic cosmos to work in, not a sectarian back-forty.

Salvation

The personal relationships for which we were created and in which we are confused because of our sin, are re-created (redeemed) by salvation. Salvation is the act of God in which we are rescued from the consequences of our sin (bondage, fragmentation) and put in a position to live in free, open, loving relationships with God and our neighbors. The double command “love God … love your neighbor …” assumes salvation as a background. Without God’s act of salvation we are “dead in trespasses and sin.” With God’s act of salvation we are able to be addressed by a whole series of commands by which we are ordered into live, whole, healthy relationships with God and other persons.

The most pondered act of salvation in Israel was the Exodus. It was the great act in which she experienced God as Savior and herself as saved. The event was the kerygmatic center to all of Hebrew life — a glad proclamation of the dynamic action by which it was now possible to live with meaning and in praise before a holy and living God. This kerygma was preserved in the Feast of Passover. The annual repetition of the feast kept the memory fresh. In ritual meal, storytelling and psalms-singing, the deliverance from Egyptian slavery and inauguration into new life as a free people of God was relived, understood, and sung within the domestic environs of the family. The people were saved — they were defined, shaped, and centered not by military, political, or environmental forces but by the act of God. Salvation was God acting decisively in history so that each person, both individually and corporately, was free to live in faith. Salvation — God doing for us what we cannot do for ourselves, overcoming the powers of bondage, leading through the forces of evil, establishing the people in fact as God’s beloved — was announced in the Feast of Passover as present and personal.

The salvation story, as it takes form in the Exodus narrative, is awesome and majestic. No story is more memorable in the life of God’s people and it is only surpassed among Christians by Easter, a final and completed Exodus. The devout and grateful mind of Israel returned over and over again to the event, remembering, understanding, praising, and responding. The story mixes elements of miracle and the mundane in combinations that set the imagination reeling: the majesty of God and the misery of the people, the stuttering tongue of Moses, the hard heart of Pharaoh, the victory over what everyone supposed were invincible political powers (the Egyptians) and unassailable physical obstacles (the Sea of Reeds). But, however awesome, it was unmistakably historical: it occurred in datable time and locatable space and therefore had consequences in present time and space. No one ever supposed it was a timeless myth that could be used (or not used) to “understand” human existence; it was a historical event that demonstrated beyond argument that God saved his people.

By preaching this act of salvation at the annual Feast of Passover, the people repeatedly came to terms with the hard-edged historical reality that they owed their present existence to an act of God that rescued them from that to which they were doomed, that set them in a new way of life against all worldly odds, and that made them whole for a life of faith. The word “salvation” in the course of its biblical usage developed both the sense of “rescue from destruction” and “restoration to health.”³

Salvation means to be whole again, to be delivered in the midst of peril. Far back toward the Hebrew root of the word, it may even suggest that no matter how closely the evil hedges you about, God will yet clear for you all the space you need to move around it: “I called upon the LORD in distress: the LORD answered me, and set me in a large place” (Ps. 118:5, KJV). Passover was the concentrated, annual attention that Israel gave to God’s definitive act of saving love.

But the repetition of the celebration carried with it a danger, the danger that salvation itself should be ritualized and institutionalized. The Passover ritual that was designed to represent the great impossibilities and indescribable realities of grace, was, after all, very visible. It was acted out by the wise and the foolish, the bright and the dull, the pious and the impious, year after year whether these persons felt like it or not. That which was charged with creative power in the beginning, through the years, and with each repetition of the ritual, was in danger of becoming a shell, a husk of reality. If that continued, there would come a time when the entire nation would experience only the ritual and not the reality, knowing only the institution and not the salvation.

In order to protect against this danger someone with pastoral genius assigned the Song of Songs for reading at Passover. The central act of Passover celebration is the eating of a ritual meal. The meal concludes with the reading of the Song of Songs.⁴ The reading, of course, was not originally a part of the feast; the feast was kept long before the Song was written. But at some point the Song was assigned as a concluding reading to the seder, the Passover meal. That assignment was clearly a pastoral act. The reading of the Song in the context of Passover is a demonstration that the glorious, once-for-all historical event of salvation in which God’s people are established in the way of God’s love is workable in the everyday domestic settings of intimacy between persons. It bridges the transition from Exodus event to daily activities so that there is no loss of wonder, intensity, or joy. The Song is the most inward, the most intimate, the most personal of all the biblical books (excepting, perhaps, The Psalms). It complements the historical re-enactment with a personal reparticipation. It draws attention from the historical setting to the inward relationships. No lyrics, ancient or modern, communicate the intimacies and the exuberances of being whole and good in relation to another — that is, of being saved — more convincingly than the Song.

Lloyd R. Bailey has called attention to the fact “That sacred texts are not randomly to be read, but that each has its proper occasion and combination with other texts … an idea well attested in the ancient world including Israel and her neighbors.”⁵ Theodore H. Gaster in Thespis⁶ cites the example of the recitation of the creation story (Enuma Elish...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I. The Pastoral Work of Prayer-Directing: Song of Songs
• II. The Pastoral Work of Story-Making: Ruth
• III. The Pastoral Work of Pain-Sharing: Lamentations
• IV. The Pastoral Work of Nay-Saying: Ecclesiastes
• V. The Pastoral Work of Community-Building: Esther
• Epilogue