Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work (Peterson)--The Pastoral Work of Story-Making: Ruth

Here were my quotes from the second chapter of Peterson's book. Again, I'm sorry I am unable to give page numbers since I'm reading this one on a kindle, but I have left the footnote numbers in to the quotes he gives so you can trace them in his book. This is from the second chapter only:

The Pastoral Work of Story-Making: Ruth

She is the inconsequential outsider whose life is essential for telling the complete story of salvation. The concluding lines of the story have a surprise ending, "0. Henry" quality to them; "So Boaz took Ruth and she became his wife ... and she bore a son.... They named him Obed; he was the father of Jesse, the father of David" (Ruth 4:13, 17). However modest and unassuming this story is, it can never be judged insignificant -Ruth was the great-grandmother of King David! Ruth is the instance of a person uprooted, obscure, alienated who learned to understand her story as a modest but nevertheless essential part of the vast epic whose plot is designed by God's salvation.

The Hebrews were the world's first historians. Because they were convinced that God worked among them where they were, each day, they believed that what they did, whether in faith or unbelief, sin or righteousness, obedience or rebellion, was significant. Because it was significant, it was capable of being narrated as a story, that is, as an account in which what people did had consequences and was part of a structured purpose. A story begins, has a middle, and ends. Everything in it has a point, a meaning. Nothing is irrelevant.

The short story is the pastoral form for narrating Heilsgeschichte (salvation history) in the vocabulary of Seelsgeschichte (soul history).

Condescension is the other pastoral error to which story-telling telling is a prevention. Pastors are very frequently bored with dull people, irritated with difficult people, and frustrated by incalcitrant people. Persons who don't sing the hymns heartily, who don't tithe faithfully, who don't attend worship regularly, who don't read the Bible intelligently, who don't love maturely -all these persons are the bane of pastoral life. It is not surprising that the pastor -who does sing the hymns robustly, tithe generously, is always at worship, who brings a well-trained mind to the reading of the Bible, and who, it goes without saying, is mature in his love -should find it hard not to be condescending toward many if not most of his parishioners. But if these same persons are approached with the interests and expectations of a storyteller, everything changes. If each parishioner is a key person in a story, everything is alive and interesting. All the details of the day are relevant.

The pastor begins this work, then, not so much as a storyteller, but as one who believes that there is a story to be told, the curiosity to be attentive to the life of another, and the determination to listen through the apparently rambling digressions sions until a plot begins to emerge. He is a regional worker, a plodder who prefers to pry open the vents of one stuffy, closed-up up life, rather than to dazzle, with melodramatics, a crowd of diversion-hungry dilettantes. Such pastoral attention is heuristic, tic, discovering in every fresh encounter with the commonplace a new aspect of the story. The nineteenth-century French clinician Laennec used to say to his students: "Listen, listen to your patient! He is giving you the diagnosis." Laennec was a good physician; he invented the stethoscope.

As a counselor, the pastor is secularized away from being a friend in Christ into functioning as a substitute for God, which is, in effect, an act of idolatry. It is an extremely difficult process to resist, for who does not like to be treated as a god?

"'Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?"' Jesus rejected the idolatrous position in which the greeting placed him and said, "'Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone."' (Mark 10:17-18) While the man's address might be justified on later christological grounds, under the circumstances it can only be seen as an attempt to put Jesus in the role of responsible expert and himself in the role of helpless amateur. As a person practiced in the ways of buying and selling for a profit, he knew how to put himself in an inferior position in order to get what he needed: turn Jesus into a counselor, from whom he could buy advice on eternal life. Jesus refused the role and insisted that both of them were on the same level -"'You know the commandments,"' that is, we both have access to the same revelation.

Paul's fondness for prefixing the words for Christian vocation with syn is further evidence of this. In the AV it is translated "fellow" (fellow citizen, fellow heir, fellow helper, fellow laborer, fellow prisoner, fellow servant, fellow soldier, fellow worker, etc.). Whatever Paul is, and whatever people are -they are in it together, they are companions in faith. The pastoral visit is not the condescending visit of the superior to the inferior, and not the professional visit of one who has something to one who does not have it. It is an act of collaboration in order to demonstrate the mutuality of the Christian discipleship. Paul's inventiveness in finding ways to express this comes through vividly in a sentence in his letter to the Ephesians where he uses three syn-compounds in succession. cession. He describes the Gentiles as "fellow heirs [synkleronomal, ronomal, members of the same body [syssomal, and partakers of [symmetochal the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel" (Eph. 3:6).

The pastor is God's spy searching out ways of grace.

In some ways both counseling and visitation are minimal pastoral acts: the pastor doesn't do very much. God is at work before we come on the scene and continues to work after we leave it.

"not only is complaint tolerated by God, but it can even be the proper stance of a person who takes God seriously! Anyone who ascribes full sovereignty to a just and merciful God may expect to encounter the problem of theodicy, and to wrestle with that problem is no sin, even when it leads to an attempt to put God on trial. Petulant Jonah, earnest Jeremiah, persistent Job -Naomi stands in the company" 17