Dear Pastor...

A few months back I wrote a series of "Dear Trinity..." letters. Here is one of the best "Dear Pastor..." letters I've ever read. This week I will go to my third Western Theological Seminary D.Min. cohort gathering--this time at Flathead Lake, Montana. We will stay at the Lutheran Bible Camp that neighbor's Eugene Peterson's lifelong cabin--Selah House. Our days will be spent reflecting together about the pastoral vocation. I feel profoundly blessed to be involved with this community. 

Also, Matt Kolden has received and accepted a Call to serve as pastor at Christ Lutheran in Valencia, CA. He will begin later in the Summer. But first, he will be ordained. Plans and schedules are still in the works, and we will be communicating more on that soon. What is ordination anyway? Is it magic--hocus-pocus? Is it a reward for academic completion or an exemplary lifestyle? I am moved by what Eugene Peterson writes to pastors, "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, 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 dancers or the lovers or the singers--at best we only see 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 those 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 are strong influences intent on diluting or destroying it. We want you to help us: be our pastor, a minister of 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 drizzle. this isn't the only task in the life of faith, but it is your task. We will find someone else to the 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. This 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 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 goin 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." Eugene H. Peterson, Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity. Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1987. Pages 23-25.