Witness to Surprise

My previous post was, perhaps, a bit long on what I don’t (or didn’t) like about the word “pastor” and short on what is good and positive and substantive about the vocation.  Chalk it up to my incorrigible “glass-half-empty” perspective :).  Or something like that.  At any rate, my estimation of the pastoral vocation has been on a long and steady trajectory of rehabilitation, not least due to my encountering of inspiring examples of what it can and should be along the way.   One of them, Frederick Buechner, captures much of what I was trying to convey in my post—both the potential pitfalls inherent to the position as well as the wonderful opportunities and privileges that can be part of a life with and for God and others—in this passage from Telling Secrets:

Ministers run the awful risk… of ceasing to be witnesses to the presence in their own lives—let alone in the lives of the people they are trying to minister to—of a living God who transcends everything they think they know and can say about him and is full of extraordinary surprises.  Instead, they tend to become professionals who have mastered all the techniques of institutional religion and who speak on religious matters with what often seems a maximum of authority and a minimum of vital personal involvement…

Obviously ministers are not called to be in that sense professionals.  God forbid.  I believe that they are called instead, together with all other Christians and would-be Christians, to consider the lilies of the field, to consider the least of these my brethren, to consider the dead sparrow by the roadside.  Maybe prerequisite to all of those, they are called upon to consider themselves—what they love and what they fear, what they are ashamed of, what makes them sick to their stomachs, what rejoices their hearts.  I believe that ministers and everyone are called also to consider Jesus of Nazareth in whom God himself showed how crucial human life is by actually living one and hallowed human death by actually dying one and who lives and dies still with us and for us and in spite of us.  I believe we are called to see that the day-to-day lives of all of us—the things that happened long ago, the things that happened only this morning—are also hallowed and crucial and part of a great drama in which souls are lost and souls are saved including our own.